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?
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 ...
Clinton's campaign was against Bush, so they were throwing these words back at him.
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; i...
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?
~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.
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 whol...
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.)
I at least partially agree with this. I'm less interested in virtue signaling per se than I am in using it as a brief exploration to highlight a common misconception about how signaling works. Plausibly virtue signaling isn't the clearest example of this, but I do think it's a pretty good case of the broader point: people tend to talk about signals mostly when they are deficient in various ways, but then that tarnish rubs off onto all signaling universally. I think it's really important that signals are extremely good in general, except ones that are dumb because they're costly to implement or goodharted or what-have-you. This really does not come through when people talk about signaling.
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 ...
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 fo...
I think I basically mean it straightforwardly. In my mind it is pretty similar to other moral injunctions like "tell the truth" or "speak up for the bullied"—it is important to resolve to do it ahead of time, because in the moment it might be quite hard and costly to do so. So if someone were to start talking about how actually the bullied need to learn to stick up for themselves, etc etc, I would want to remind myself and others that while this is true, it shouldn't change my moral resolution to stand up to bullying. (It's perfectly fine for people to dis...
There are plenty of things you should still resolve to do. You don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater by maintaining maximum irresolution so you'll never have difficulty changing your mind. Just change your mind when important evidence comes in—and in this case, I'm trying to point out that it is not important evidence against internalizing externalities. (It is evidence against levying the full externality cost and failing to try mitigating trades that reduce that externality cost.)
Given that serial interval is a very effective way to amplify an already-high R0 to great evolutionary advantage, and common colds/flu etc all have developed serial interval of more like 1-2 days showing there's plenty of room for COVID to climb in this regard, I would expect lots of new dominant strains to show shortened serial interval regardless of heritage.
Not sure if there's publication bias or measurement bias here but the first link on google shows a study estimating Omicron serial interval at 2.2 days in South Korea.
Ah, good point.
The main reason I don't automatically make a huge adjustment for this is that it seemed that there were still ~25% false negatives at peak contagiousness by PCR according to some studies. And 40% false negatives a few days later. All sort of things are possible, like that these studies included many asymptomatic and acontagious cases, but having seen anecdotal corroboration of this phenomenon, I'm inclined to think something weird is going on.
But I should give some weight to it though—perhaps 2x less ineffective when compared to contagiousness, so maybe 60% efficacy for rapid and 75% for PCR?
Good point re the urban centers, was pretty dumb of me to forget to adjust for that. I've added two ETAs to the post to account for this.
I can't confirm you didn't talk about this, but the only thing of importance I haven't seen you mention in these is that the serial interval might be much smaller (eg as mentioned here), so that R0 and number of secondary infections is not so vastly higher even as we see incredibly fast doubling times. I think people don't realize how much this effect played a part in Delta's containability, even while Delta overtook other variants very quickly and it seemed pretty concerning at the beginning.
Specifically, if Omicron is tearing through vaccinated pop...
I think you're right that the initial blog post is repeatedly making a big mistake: running into a values difference and using the mood argument as evidence against the position.
I think to turn this into a useful heuristic, the patch is to reverse the order of operations. If you go from Noticing Missing Mood -> Be Suspicious you can easily used this to tar your political opposition. But if you go from Intuition of Suspicion -> Look for Missing Mood, it can be a highly productive heuristic for determining what seems to be wrong with someone’s argument...
Yes, it definitely will, and yes that will be unacceptable. Will that be because of vaccinated scrupulous LessWrong-reading mask-wearing 30yos during the holidays? No. That will contribute much less harm-to-benefit than many, many other actions.
First, I think we are all still pretty far from living as normal. Many things in our past lives would have been more than 1k microcovids.
Second, even the most informal versions of test and trace (telling your friends if you develop any symptoms, so they can tell their friends) can significantly reduce transmission rate.
Third, all this is in the context of the holidays. Fourth, 30yos are not the only segment of society. Fifth, the health care system is not yet close to capacity in almost all places (if your local hospitals are overwhelmed, obviously do not act normally). Etc
Ah, stocking up on $2 tests would be awesome! That I would certainly endorse.
My reasoning on antigen false negatives is coming from a few lines of evidence. Perhaps I can share some later. But in short, 1) lots of studies have found much higher than average false negative rates, so results are high-variance/heterogeneous 2) my anecdotal counts of people around me concords with the above studies 3) my prior is fairly high on studies overestimating the efficacy of tests, based on BOTH lab conditions being extra controlled and on scientists being biased towar...
Regarding timing, I think you want to test the day of. The day before is probably fine too. But Delta seemed like it was progressing fast enough that a 1-day lag would lose you a large chunk of the effectiveness.
Regarding mentioning testing in general—I think it helps a little but not enough to matter in most cases. I'm under the impression that PCR tests have a false negative rate of about 50% and antigen tests 70%, which basically translates into risk of .5x and .7x for an event. But if you're home for the holidays, you'd have to keep testing repeatedly ...
Using a counterfactual of "getting COVID a few years later and you balance out" is certainly tempting, but I don't think that's really how it would go down. Based on how vaccine efficacy wanes, reinfections occur, and new variants are introduced, my guess is that you lose all your immunity and more within 2 years, plus in the next decade we probably will develop increasingly effective drugs against it. Hard to sum everything up but my guess is that getting COVID causes a benefit that is less than half the badness. Probably I should make a best guess here and add it at some point in time but this is the type of factor of <2 that occasionally pop up on either side that I typically ignore.
But also you might lose less than two days. I think two days in expectation is actually quite conservative and it's actually more like 1 day lost in expectation
Oh no, I only meant to recommend masks in the lead-up to the gathering, not the actual gathering itself. You are absolutely right and I've edited to make this clear.
(In a P/E ratio, the "earnings" is profit, which in Cyc's case is probably negative. Gwern is using a P/S ratio, price to sales where sales=revenue, since these are usually used for startups since they're scaling and earnings are still negative. 5 seems reasonable because, while P/S can go much higher for startups rapidly scaling, Cyc doesn't seem to be rapidly scaling.)
I thought I was being generous by applying what several articles/blog posts told me was a fairly typical multiplier for small private businesses: I can't think offhand of an 'AI startup' (are you still a 'startup' if you are 26 years old and going nowhere fast?) I'd rather own less than a big knowledge base and inference engine dating from the '80s. In any case, if you believe the multiplier should be much bigger than 5x, then that makes buying look all the worse.
Hopefully my comment above makes this more clear now, but the 37% is supposed to imply the extremely strong pricing power / oligopoly position / lack of competition and that the true cost of production is more like 1-10% than 63% of their revenue. Perhaps I should have made this more clear.
Anyways, I think this is in fact a major aspect of my true objection; if there were a bunch of small journals of academics competing and universities couldn't afford them, it would be less obvious the first step to take.
Hopefully also clear now: I'm not trying to u...
What I meant here was not that the problem was a 37% surcharge, it was that the problems were all the ones associated with a 37% OPM oligopoly in science.
First, Viliam had the right idea in the comment below—the costs rise to meet the revenue, and much of the "expenses" are going to be useless administrative bloat in a thousand different ways. The non-profit version could be run at about literally 1000x less cost: https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/1219365213201264640.
But again, the problem isn't so much the money wasted as the practices implied. To ...
This is good, thanks!
That issue is a good point; I think one variant that gets around it is one focused on pre-prints. As I understand it, some journals allow pre-prints and others don't. This basically fixes the problem for all fields with a pre-print server.
Money just isn't really a priority/bottleneck on this so nowhere is set up to take donations, except generic Sci-Hub. And that actually might be strategically bad at the moment because Elsevier, like Wormtongue himself, is claiming in the lawsuit that Sci-Hub has commercialized its works through the donations it accepts. Best to have that number stay low.
Yeah, ideally would have lampshaded this more. My bad.
The part that gets extra complex is that I personally think ~2/3+ of people who say totalization is fine for them are in fact wrong and are missing out on tons of subtle things that you don't notice until longer-term. But obviously the mostly likely thing is that I'm wrong about this. Hard to tell either way. I'd like to point this out more somehow so I can find out, but I'd sort of hoped my original comment would make things click for people without further time. I suppose I'll have to think about how to broach this further.
I agree with most of this point. I've added an ETA to the original to reflect this. My quibble (that I think is actually important) is that I think it should be less of a tradeoff and more of an {each person does the thing that is right for them}.
(I would not take this modus tollens, I don't think the "community" is even close to fundamentally bad, I just think some serious reforms are in order for some of the culture that we let younger people build here.)
But the "community" should not be totalizing.
(Also, I think rationality should still be less totalizing than many people take it to be, because a lot of people replace common sense with rationality. Instead one should totalize themselves very slowly, over years, watching for all sorts of mis-steps and mistakes, and merge their past life with their new life. Sure, rationality will eventually pervade your thinking, but that doesn't mean at age 22 you throw out all of society's wisdom and roll your own.)
Ah yeah, I should have thought more about what you meant there. Sorry. I'm still not sure I agree though—I feel like the public can be convinced of all sorts of things.
I do think growth may end up being decent evidence. I guess I'm trying to point at why I might be so agnostic without going through a 10-paragraph essay explicitly stating a bunch of scenarios.
So for example, I think people are fairly unconcerned about whether they have a 20% versus a 30% GDP growth over the next 15 years, but rightly concerned about whether there's then a pandemic tha...
I want to bring up a concept I found very useful for thinking about how to become less susceptible to these sorts of things.
(NB that while I don't agree with much of the criticism here, I do think "the community" does modestly increase psychosis risk, and the Ziz and Vassar bubbles do so to extraordinary degrees. I also think there's a bunch of low-hanging fruit here, so I'd like us to take this seriously and get psychosis risk lower than baseline.)
(ETA because people bring this up in the comments: law of equal and opposite advice applies. Many people seem...
Rationality ought to be totalizing. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory
Regarding Eliezer's tweets, I think the issue is that he is joking about the "never stop screaming". He is using humor to point at a true fact, that it's really unfortunate how unreliable neural nets are, but he's not actually saying that if you study neural nets until you understand them then you will have a psychotic break and never stop screaming.
Not sure why you think domestic pressure / public agreement is strong evidence. Public pressure for all sorts of things seems hardly correlated with whether they're beneficial.
I think the strongest arguments for Brexit are pretty orthogonal to the economy. Things like "can the government react to crises on the order of weeks instead of months". I do think enough crises would give us data on this but I'm not even sure it will be reasonable to extract counterfactuals from several. Other reasons to do Brexit seem similarly hard to measure compared to myopic economic impact.
FWIW, I personally don't have much evidence to determine whether Brexit was good. Seems plausible to me that you're right that they now just have different bureaucratic downsides. I've read a few things about being able to make ARIA (UK version of ARPA) and some other things from 2019 that make me lean somewhat positive, but I'm extremely agnostic. I have a bunch of thoughts on quality of evidence here, but suffice it to say I am not sure whether we will ever get much Bayesian evidence on goodness or badness. So my interest in DC is relatively orthogonal to whether Brexit turns out to be object-level good or bad (even though ideally I would know this and be able to include it in my model of how much to believe his beliefs).
Oh awesome, you already made the important argument here. Thanks. I'll leave up my comment above saying similarly, though.
First, I already agreed this was true. But if you write about the urgent need for planning for biosecurity a year before a pandemic, quote a biosecurity report that mentions 8ish diseases, you cut a few from your block quote for concision, and then one of the 8 that you didn't specific use in your block quote (but which you were definitely writing about!) occurs in a global pandemic... I just think it's pretty reasonable to say "I wrote about this". I might not do it per se, but if a friend of mine did it, I wouldn't bat an eyelid. If a random acquaintance...
Sorry, I deliberated for a while on whether to include it, but for a number of reasons decided I wanted to just ignore the politics-as-mindkiller and focus on everything else. Ideally I would have mentioned something about this, I just felt like addressing it in any respect would immediately lead to discussion about politics-as-mindkiller and not help. Also I didn't think this post would get much publicity. Still don't really regret it.
I will say though, here, I think >90% of the value I got from his writings was orthogonal to ideology-level politics. I...
Many people have brought this up to me and I think it's extremely misleading. Basically, he wrote this blog post about the dangers of possible pandemics that governments weren't taking seriously, and heavily rested on giant block quotes from a good source, as he often does. In the block quote he included sections on like 4/8 of the pathogens they warned about, separated by ellipses. After the pandemic he went back and added to his block quote the section on coronaviruses specifically, to show that bio-risk people were already warning about this BEFORE it h...
In a press conference, he claims. "Last year I wrote about the possible threat of coronaviruses and the urgent need for planning," I am failing to find mention of coronavirus in that original. I also note https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/26/dominic-cummings-says-he-did-not-tell-whole-truth-about-journeys-to-durham-barnard-castle.
I remain unconvinced that he is "extremely committed to truth-seeking".
Also, any recs on dev econ textbooks?
Yes, they've made it very clear that that's the reasoning, and I am saying I disagree.
A) I still think they are not correct (long evidence below)
B) Ct values are clearly somewhat useful, and the question is how much—and I do not think the public health comms apparatus should stifle somewhat-useful medical information reaching patients or doctors just because I might be misled. That's just way too paternalistic.
As to why I think they're wrong, I'll cross-post from my fb thread against the specific pdf linked in op, though all other arguments seem isomorphic...
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.
Another cool data point! I found a paper from Singapore, Jul 2020, testing tear swabs but incidentally giving a bunch of PCR tests too. I'm much more likely to trust a paper that gives PCR tests incidentally, rather than is directly testing their effectiveness with researcher bias toward better results. By counting up the squares by hand, this paper shows 24/108 PCR tests came back negative if I counted correctly: that's 22% false negative rate (FNR).
Now, for adjustments:
Kelly always applies