Replying toLearned pain as a leading cause of chronic pain

Learned pain as a leading cause of chronic pain

I think this diagnosis is an important and true option. (And thanks for the write-up!) However, I find myself deeply wishing the treatment was focused more on something objective, rather than "convincing" yourself the pain isn't from real tissue damage—especially since the diagnosis is so probabilistic.

What happens if you are wrong about the tissue damage? My own experiences with chronic pain have in fact all come after what I am quite sure was real and significant tissue damage (one exception). And I have had numerous other experiences in sports of assuming some small-to-medium pain was not significant tissue damage, then playing through it and aggravating it in ways I believe were also... (read more)

Replying toWas the K-T event a Great Filter?

Connor_FlexmanOct 07, 2025

Was the K-T event a Great Filter?

I like the hypothesis of "mass extinction can cause periods of EQ skyrocketing". It fits with post-war economic booms, and the vague idea that clearing out old species would cause higher variance in new species (and thus some with higher IQ/EQ).

On the other hand, it's definitely not a Great Filter. That concept means it would filter out >99% of intelligent species. As you mention, this should happen on average once every 500M years. So even if a mass extinction were absolutely required for huge intelligence increases, we'd see these many times over the course of a typical pre-intelligence-bearing planet.

Replying toTail SP 500 Call Options

Connor_Flexman1y

Tail SP 500 Call Options

Kelly always applies

-17

Replying toThomas Kwa's MIRI research experience

Connor_Flexman2y

Thomas Kwa's MIRI research experience

Re rockets, I might be misunderstanding, but I’m not sure why you’re imagining doubling the number of molecules. Isn’t the idea that you hold molecules constant and covalent energy constant, then reduce mass to increase velocity? Might be worth disambiguating your comparator here: I imagine we agree that light hydrogen would be better than heavy hydrogen, but perhaps you’re wondering about kerosene?

Replying toNoting an error in Inadequate Equilibria

Connor_Flexman3y

Noting an error in Inadequate Equilibria

I'm aware this is kind of hard to justify, but I'm basically an apologist on this one. I think he was mostly right and just exaggerated the measurable magnitude. It's just so damn hard to come up with examples that are not only true and illustrative and compelling and not confusing, but also very measurably true. I do wish he had provided a more justifiable core example and overstated the result less, but I do basically the same when I'm trying to make a point. On my list of metrics I think he satisficed basically fine—I can't think of any better examples off the top of my head from pre-COVID.

[ETA: someone asked... (read 359 more words →)

Connor_Flexman3y

Clinton's campaign was against Bush, so they were throwing these words back at him.

Connor_Flexman3yQuick Take

A Few Lessons from Dominic Cummings on Politics

Barbell model of voters (or "delusion of the centre"), where many in the electorate are far to the left of politicians on white collar crime and higher taxes on the rich but far to the right of politicians on violent crime, anti-terrorism, and immigration.

You want to be empirical in a way almost all in politics aren't: run tons of focus groups and really listen to how your voters think, not just what policies they want.

Use a best-in-class data model. Polls naturally swing all over, much polling is bad; if you use these, make them Bayesian and get great people who really know what they're doing... (read more)

Replying toVisible Homelessness in SF: A Quick Breakdown of Causes

Connor_Flexman4y

Visible Homelessness in SF: A Quick Breakdown of Causes

Note that
A) zooming in on most city hubs will find you monetary concentrations like this, e.g. Manhattan has a GDP pc of $370k
B) I have never actually heard anyone argue that making the city richer is the path to solving homelessness despite living there for a long time, so suspect this might be an error—are you conflating this with deregulating the housing market? Or do people actually argue somewhere that more money would solve homelessness?

Replying toExperience on Meloxicam

Connor_Flexman4y

Experience on Meloxicam

~same. I use a Kinesis Freestyle with 20" cord, that finally ~fixed my wrists after 4 years, and I'm extremely excited for the Kinesis Advantage360 coming out some time this year.

Replying toHome Antigen Tests Aren’t Useful For Covid Screening

Connor_Flexman4y

Home Antigen Tests Aren’t Useful For Covid Screening

I think my current expectation of risk reduction from antigen tests is more like 20-60% than <10%, but I'll also note that it matters a lot what your population is. In Elizabeth's social circle my guess is that most people aren't coming to parties if they've had any suspected positive contact, have any weak symptoms, etc, such that there's a strong selection effect screening out the clearly-positive people. (Or like, imagine everyone with these risk factors takes an antigen test anyways—then requiring tests doesn't add anything.)

I haven't read this whole thread but for the record, I often agree with Michael Mina and think he does great original thinking about these topics, yet... (read more)

Reminder that US is crossing 50% BA.2 in the next few days, CA and NY have started to uptick, so probably in 4 weeks it will be a serious wave peaking in like 6-8ish weeks. Plan accordingly!

(So ~4 weeks where things are fineish, then ~7 weeks where rates are higher, then 4 weeks to come back down. I.e. plan for May and June to have lots of COVID, and potential restrictions to continue into July.)

Remember remember remember, costly signaling is supposed to be about cost-to-fake, not cost-burnt-to-signal. It is not like Bitcoin. If you own an original Picasso, it is costless to show that you own it, but very costly for someone to fake owning it (have to commission an elaborate copy).

“Virtue signaling” should be thought of with this in mind. If you or someone else is frowning upon a virtue signal, that’s not because of the inherent structure of signaling. It means either it’s a corrupted signal, they’re being annoying with their signal, or it’s not a signal to begin with. For example, if someone can post a bunch of tweets about Latest Crisis costlessly,... (read more)

Mimesis has re-revealed its awesome and godly power to me over the last few months. Not Girardian mimesis, but hominid mimesis. Best way to do almost anything is to literally copy others, especially the best people but really the triangulation between any few people will do. Don’t know how to write an email? Copy it from an email you received. Don't know how to do any chore, cooking, dance, etc? Just look it up on youtube. This is a long ways from Connor of 2018, who fastidiously avoided watching youtube videos of poi so I could explore it all on my own for months.

Mimesis has a bad rap in my local culture.... (read more)

COVID and the holidays

Connor_Flexman

6 months ago I wrote about how 30-year-olds should basically go back to normal and no longer take many COVID precautions.

The holidays make this policy somewhat worse, because you can infect your family members. Further, vaccine efficacy has waned about 3x for most people since it’s been about six months since the vaccine wave. Some people have expressed concern about solstice in particular, which seems to turn out relatively safe. So let’s examine how you might navigate this.

The key takeaway is that a 1% chance of having COVID, which is about the base rate of COVID in the US, costs older relatives a few days of life if you pass it on... (read 2510 more words →)

Sci-Hub sued in India

Connor_Flexman

Sci-Hub is being sued by Elsevier, again, this time in India. Two other large publishers are also on the suit.

Sci-Hub has been getting sued in lots of Western countries over the past 6 years and losing default judgments because they didn’t really defend. In India, they have a better shot:

The founder Alexandra Elbakyan is actually mounting a defense this time
India has comparatively lenient copyright law
India is poor enough that the "public interest" angle is multiplied manyfold due to Elsevier’s absurd profit margin and prices

Last, it's higher-stakes than normal, because in India the plaintiffs have requested a dynamic injunction. This is a recent legal mechanism that would let the plaintiffs obtain court injunctions... (read 2061 more words →)

131

Choice Writings of Dominic Cummings

Connor_Flexman

“My own heuristics for working in politics are: focus, ‘know yourself’ (don’t fool yourself), think operationally, work extremely hard, ... and ask yourself ‘to be or to do?’” - DC

Dominic Cummings is fascinating for four reasons. One, he is extremely committed to truth-seeking but from a different perspective than most of LW. Two, he has a shocking amount of real-world “success”, especially for a truth-seeker. Three, he fills the missing niche of trying to describe what government is actually like, to great effect. Four, he has uniquely powerful ideas about how to do project management well and how to fix government.

At the very least, he is extremely thought-provoking, and provides tons of... (read 1352 more words →)

121

Weird models of country development?

Connor_Flexman

A Scott Alexander post argued that plausibly "land reform" was a vital first step to developing most countries in Asia. I hadn't heard any clear theory like this before—all the development goals I hear about sound like "get them more education and democracy" or sometimes "invest in them so they can develop their economies". Does anyone have other novel models of how to develop countries, like the idea of land reform as prerequisite, that are far outside the mainstream?

(Given that >$40b are now committed to EA, it seems plausible to me that most of the current best charities and even cause areas will soon be fully funded. If so, the bottleneck becomes opening new cause areas. Pushing hard for novel and better developmental economic policies seems like one of the possibilities with highest impact/neglect/tractability combination, with plausible comparative advantage in tractability through non-ideological thinking and pulling the policy rope sideways.)

Another sad regulation-induced (and likely public health comms-reinforced) inadequacy: we don't report Ct values on PCR tests. Ct value stands for cycle threshold, which means how many cycles a PCR amp has to do before the virus is detected. So, it directly measures viral load. But it isn't reported to us on tests for some reason: here's an example document saying why it shouldn't be reported to patients or used to help them forecast progression. Imo a very bad and unnecessary decision.

Delta Strain: Fact Dump and Some Policy Takeaways

Connor_Flexman

Curation notice by Raemon: Curated. It seems really important to figure out how to deal with the Delta variant, and how to interface with covid variants longterm. I appreciated this post for:

Striking a good balance of presenting current facts on the ground
Noting where assumptions lie
Being clear about it's epistemic status, while
Aiming to be useful in the immediate term.

(Not a doctor; merely extrapolating lines of reasoning where they will go; all policy “recommendations” are entirely hypothetical and not actual recommendations; I rushed to finish this while it's still useful and relevant, so errors will exist and I apologize for the style)

Summary

As many of you know, the Delta strain of COVID is basically upon... (read 4742 more words →)

119

Saving this example for later, when everyone claims the CDC and other "experts" didn't act incredibly stupidly about boosters:

"Americans who have been fully vaccinated do not need a booster shot at this time," according to a joint statement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA). "We continue to review any new data as it becomes available and will keep the public informed."

The statement came after Pfizer-BioNTech announced plans to seek authorization for a booster shot for its COVID-19 vaccine. Though all the vaccine manufacturers have been studying booster shots just in case they would be needed, Pfizer's decision to seek authorization so soon took... (read more)

Causes of a Debt Crisis—Economic

Connor_Flexman

The crazy thing about debt crises is that they don’t get incentivized away by an efficient market. First, prices are way too high, then they’re way too low—why don’t self-interested people profit enough on avoiding them for us all to avoid them?

Part of why I have never seen a satisfactory answer to this question is because it turns out it’s highly polycausal. I’m going to save the interesting epistemic reasons for the next essay; this one will be on the three biggest economic causes, in my understanding.

The first reason is unalterably cyclical economics. The second reason is that price forces are asymmetric to the upside because shorting assets is so much more... (read 2253 more words →)

Intro to Debt Crises

Connor_Flexman

In 2018 Ray Dalio wrote a book called Principles of Navigating Big Debt Crises. He argues that we are at least near enough to being in a debt crisis that it is important to start thinking about how to most gracefully deal with them. After reading it, I feel similarly. And yet, I didn’t know what a debt crisis was before his book, and many people I talk with don’t understand why bad debts can not only be hard on their owners but on the whole economy. This is an intro to what a debt crisis is and why specifically it is bad, to be followed up with some posts on their... (read 2983 more words →)

Bad metaphor mode of conversation:

Instead of saying true things or trying to make a point that meaningfully advances the conversation, you can just make points that aren't that good. Apply a bad analogy if you want.

I think this is surprisingly important around the watercooler for especially generative people, and something I've been missing and wrong about when I vaguely look down on bad metaphors. Obviously you should not use this type of conversation in getting-things-done convos or many-person convos, but it seems tailored for few-person brainstorming/decompression/speculation with open time to fill. I've never really understood why people make lots of advancements while drinking beer after work (and sorry to those who I... (read more)

Let's Go Back To Normal

Connor_Flexman

(Personal opinion; not a doctor; edited because I accidentally published the draft)

In a few months, the US should stop being careful around COVID. For the vaccinated, most of you should stop being careful now.

We’re in a new era of COVID. We have some amazingly effective vaccines that highly reduce both transmission and severity, so the emergency is effectively over for the nation (after another month or two for everyone to get a chance to take the vaccine, which they certainly all should). Cases will linger, but the point of the lockdowns and precautions of March 2020 was to buy time—to try to get a vaccine, and determine if long-term side effects were... (read 3039 more words →)

I’ve understood episteme, techne, and metis for awhile, and the vital importance of each, but I’ve been missing this understanding of gnosis. I now think I've been bouncing off the implication that’s bundled into the idea of gnosis: that knowledge of spiritual mysteries is universal, or won’t be overturned later, or is “correct”. But I think that’s a wrong way to look at things.

For example, consider “life philosophies”. People put a ton of energy thinking about existentialism and what to do about the fact that we’re all going to die. The important thing people get from it isn’t some sort of episteme; nor techne; nor metis. They process it, learn to cope,... (read more)

Treatments correlated with harm

Connor_Flexman

There's a billion different ways studies can go wrong through failure of statistics to correctly capture reality.

One very specific one is: your successful treatments will often look like they're making things worse.

This is merely a special case of confounding, but it comes up often enough I want to highlight it. And it seems specifically important for the discussion of masks and respirators.

For example (not a doctor): every new leukemia drug has a survival rate of like 30%. Base rate survival is like 60%. Does every new leukemia drug work worse than normal? Obviously not, it's that the patients trying the new drug are the ones for whom everything else has failed,... (read 855 more words →)

Ways you can get sick without human contact

Connor_Flexman

(Tl;dr: food, animals, and yourself are all carriers of disease that the average person gets ~.2x/year normally; if you include immune reaction despite non-illness, the rough base rate is probably anywhere from .02x/year to $\infty$ x/year and depends heavily on person; my own odds seem like ~10:1 non-COVID to COVID given a symptom, but yours are different; I'm not a doctor and don't have metis on this, maybe I say stupid things)

Now that people have been shut away for weeks, they've (reasonably) expected to stop getting colds and things. But I've now seen at least 3 cases, one with an extremely high level of quarantine, where someone still got a cold-like illness. This... (read 1608 more words →)

I’ve updated toward significantly less risk from COVID than I expected a week ago, for people aged 25-30:

Old numbers:

.2% mortality = 1 expected month
1.5% long-term side effect = 2 expected months
1% mortality from lack of ventilators = 5 expected months (10% hospitalized, 10% of those on ventilators, n_vent is .03% of pop and older people need more ventilators so we run out at ~1% of population infected, and no shutdown measures had been taken approximately 2 days before we hit 1% of population by my estimates)
Total = 8 expected months

New numbers (from ICL report; someone please tell me if I’m misunderstanding their context):

.05% mortality = .3 expected months
.7% long-term side effect

... (read more)

Shut up and multiply is only about very comparable things (hence the example with differing numbers of birds). Obviously very important to make Pareto improvements of the form "hold everything constant, get more of good thing X".

The main failure mode is applying it between un-like things, and accidentally making bad tradeoffs. For example, working very hard to make money to give away but then stagnating, because it turns out doing things you like is actually very important to personal growth and personal growth is very important to achieving your goals in the future. In general, making Kaldor-Hicks improvements that turn out not to be Kaldor-Hicks improvements because things had secret benefits.

Shut up... (read 492 more words →)

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Connor_Flexman

Sci-Hub sued in India

Choice Writings of Dominic Cummings

Delta Strain: Fact Dump and Some Policy Takeaways

COVID and the holidays

Connor_Flexman

Connor_Flexman

COVID and the holidays

Sci-Hub sued in India

Choice Writings of Dominic Cummings

Weird models of country development?

Delta Strain: Fact Dump and Some Policy Takeaways

Causes of a Debt Crisis—Economic

Intro to Debt Crises

Connor_Flexman

Sci-Hub sued in India

Choice Writings of Dominic Cummings

Delta Strain: Fact Dump and Some Policy Takeaways

COVID and the holidays

Connor_Flexman

Connor_Flexman

COVID and the holidays

Sci-Hub sued in India

Choice Writings of Dominic Cummings

Weird models of country development?

Delta Strain: Fact Dump and Some Policy Takeaways

Causes of a Debt Crisis—Economic

Intro to Debt Crises

Summary