All of ejacob's Comments + Replies

Answer by ejacob94

I think there is a temptation to think too hard here. Is there any work environment which remains equally functional as staff become increasingly entangled in personal relations with one another? Perhaps the current trend in the West to taboo workplace relationships has gone too far but there is a reason it started. I think your points here are interesting and could be true, but even if they were not you'd still have the effect of just having more intense relationships to navigate because employees can have more SOs on average. NB I have no experience or expertise; this is purely armchair sociology.

Do you have strong reasons for why the age limits are not +/- 10 years from the values given or are they meant more as ballpark figures?

The intent is obviously to avoid the gerontocracy of today, but I'm curious why you chose those specific numbers.

3lc
IQ tends to decline pretty dramatically after age fifty, and AFAICT the most competent people in academia/industry seem to be between 25 and 50. So I want people in office to be below the age of fifty. This reminds me that I should raise the age limit at-appointment for chief executive to 45, to be more consistent, since they only have a four year term.

Running barefoot will produce the same observations, right? So any waste heat going into your shoes is probably a small amount.

I'd be happy to offer free editing services as my time allows, and maybe the research assistant role if you could describe what you need or anticipate needing a bit more. I have a BS in statistics and have worked in AI for a few years.

1Darren McKee
Mighty kind of you. Let me make a bit more progress and then follow up :)

party girl, if you finish this series and still have club stories you end up not sharing, I would love to hear them over some coffee or lunch. I find this whole thing incredibly fascinating.

There's a neat formula starting up here. 

Crass Puppet: the glasses only give rude responses

Sass Puppet: the glasses only give sarcastic responses

Mass Puppet: the glasses convert you to Catholicism, responses are Latin prayers

Bass Puppet: the glasses... make you into a fish?

Ass Puppet: it ends in a porno

etc.

5lsusr
Grass Puppet simulates a person who is high.

GLORY TO THE DARK LOR- I mean, dark mode.

Do you have any recommendations on resources to consult or tools to buy? I was thinking of investing some time/money into learning before you posted this and this has pushed me over the top. :)

3brook
Basically any "Beginners set" online should set you right as a cheap way to try it out (though most pros say it's not worth your time. YMMV).  You will probably find it's hard with cheap shitty picks, but you'll (for fairly cheap) get a feel for which different shapes do what, and which you find most intuitive/useful. If you find it useful/fun, you could then either scour Ebay for cheap locks (with no guarantee of ease, but locks-without-keys is niche enough you can sometimes get good deals) or buy an Abus 45 or Masterlock. If I remember correctly, both of those should be 4 or 5-pin with no security pins, so about as easy as real locks get.  Once you feel you've graduated from your beginners set and want to splash some cash, you probably want to pick 1-2 pick shapes you got on well with and get really nice ones, or get a nice pick set. Here are some well-regarded vendors. You might also want to look into a practice lock, which seems like pretty good value for money.  Regarding learning, Reddit is pretty good for this one (as seems to often be the case with metis-skills). In particular, the Belts stuff seems like a pretty good curriculum. I don't expect sitting reading about lockpicking will be very useful compared to, well, picking locks (this is the whole point of this post!).  If you want to feel inspired (and never trust a lock again), LockPickingLawyer is a personal favourite with some educational stuff. He also has an excellent sense of comedic timing. Let me know what you found useful & how you get on!!

Thanks! I thought manifold had already done this, but couldn't find the feature when I went to look for it. I'll check again and then contact them if I still don't see it. Among the players I know they seem the most likely to be interested in doing it.

Is anyone aware of an online platform for making private forecasting tournaments / prediction markets with play money? Ideally I want to send someone a link, have them make an account, and then have access to a group of private questions I've made.

4Yoav Ravid
I would ask manifold markets to implement that feature, if they haven't already.

I estimate a 900% chance that no variant will ever be named 'Xi' as it would link it to a certain head of state.

-3tkpwaeub
I dunno, it's pronounced "Kai" (rhymes with "guy") but you might be right

I watched an interview of Austrians who are not dosed and stuck at home. One of the things it mentioned is that if the government forces you to get an injection, it would be responsible for any bad outcomes as a result. But since they are just putting you on house arrest, it's still the citizen's choice to get vaccinated and therefore the responsibility is shifted to them. If I believed the vaccines were likely to cause substantial harm this would look like a way for the government to mandate dangerous vaccines without actually doing it. So the increased c... (read more)

3tkpwaeub
I'm quite certain that not getting vaccinated would result in a civil penalty (such as a fine) rather than a criminal one (prison) so practically people still have a choice (get vaccinated or pay a fine)

This is delightful. You should absolutely bring this up when she's older.

Just as a note, I think there is a history of outlandish/trolling advice letters being submitted to Slate, especially about culture war issues. I have no idea if the linked article here is sincere or not though. Something something Poe's law.

A note to anyone looking to lie for a booster shot: I tried to be clever and tell the pharmacist I needed a second Moderna dose (both so i wouldn't be pressed into getting another dose afterward and so I could insist on Moderna). I then had to prove my first dose was also Moderna which i obviously couldn't do, so i was refused a dose (yes, really.) When i asked, the pharmacist confirmed that if I'd asked for a first dose instead i would have gotten it. So don't be clever, just pretend you were hesitant and now you are getting over it.

I consistently had to force down the "wow i want to read that next" response I typically get.

3lsusr
Me too. That's the effect I was going for.

Unfortunately there is also the risk that bystanders decide you have given your kids too much independence and call the police or otherwise harass you. Lenore Skenazy had this happen to her when she allowed her son to take a subway by himself.

It sounds like you are interested in some ideas related to Free Range parenting; Let Grow might also be of interest.

I think OP did include that: "Get stopped by the police or others, who might think they're too young to be out on their own."

I found that reading Lenore Skenazy is good for having a properly-calibrated kidnapping risk assessment but potentially extremely bad for having a properly-calibrated "being hassled by police / CPS / busybodies / etc." risk assessment. Ironically, it's the same dynamic: she reports every time it happens anywhere, so you just get this idea that everybody everywhere is hassling kids playing outside without adult supervision, independently of how frequently that actually happens. (I don't know with what frequency it actually happens.) (I stopped reading her blog many years ago.)

Most plausibly, a mixture of private charity or investment and/or some sort of loan or "donation" by the host country.

8cousin_it
Let's put some numbers on it. The average US worker is backed by tens of thousands of dollars in physical capital, there's no other way to achieve high productivity. Multiply that by the number of people in the proposed country, and you'll get a sum that even a government won't spend willy nilly. It's a far cry from "let's donate our vacant land to refugees, they will become highly productive for free". A better analogy would be "let's build a vacant city - housing, roads, power, water, stores, warehouses, factories and all the rest, for a million people - and invite a million refugees to fill it".

I think that is necessarily true, yes. A reasonable thing to do would be to report multiple numbers; "confirmed cases", "suspected cases", "estimated total cases", each with a clear definition.

The medical examiner thing seems totally fine - in this county they only see bodies that are sent for autopsies; i.e. something is fishy about their death. If you die in an ICU because of low oxygenation you don't get sent to the medical examiner. If you die from a knife to the back and your family wants to argue that you died from COVID-19 then it makes sense for the medical examiner to want them to pay for it.

  • My mom, a Suffolk county based doctor who used to do autopsies
2Zvi
I'm not passing judgment on what the right thing to do is, but if the count is the proven cases only, this does result in a systematic undercount, right?
Answer by ejacob80

Two treatments I've heard of through unverified interwebs:

Ivermectin (yeah I follow that guy's YouTube, there's lots of study about it but afaik the usefulness for smell loss in particular is anecdotal). The mechanism would likely be that it clears out residual viral particles/pieces of cellular garbage that are causing damage.

LSD (apparently a small dose helped a guy? I think this story is on Zvi's latest covidpost.) Obviously a lot more risk with this one and I would guess it could only work by increasing sensory output because psychedelics. (This kinda tracks with the essential oils suggestion? Sniffing stuff a lot could rewire some neurons I guess.)

Good luck!

8Steven Byrnes
If LSD works, I would guess that it works because low-level sensory processing normally has its learning rate set to ~0 in adults, but LSD increases the learning rate, allowing it to rewire and adapt itself, and in particular adjust its connections to ignore dead neurons or whatever. That's kinda uninformed speculation after reading this
3Maxwell Peterson
Thanks. I had googled Ivermectin a bit yesterday but everything was talking about treating chronic fatigue. Is Ivermectin even a thing for smell/taste at all (anecdotally)? Sounds like you have heard of its use for those specific symptoms?

Is your immunocompromised buddy amenable to prophylaxis? I don't even really know how many pro-ivermectin-for-covid doctors think ivermectin prophylaxis works but it might be worth looking into since it is very cheap and relatively easy to tolerate. There are probably other options that i know even less about. Consult a trusted physician :)

1Josh Jacobson
My guess is that this isn't going to be worthwhile to look into in this case (facing a complicated, deadly disease with many, many medicines being taken for it, and a fragile health status) but I appreciate the suggestion.

Oh and add on to this some Israeli cousins (who all received Pfizer), at least 7? With the same side effects.

I haven't really taken stock of this before, but given how many people I know have received a vaccination the lack of reported long-term effects seems like a notable signal.

Answer by ejacob30

My close family had 3 people receive 2x Pfizer, 1 2x Moderna, and 1 2x Novavax (part of a clinical trial). No side effects beyond muscle aches/fever/malaise for at most 24 hrs.

NB Novavax is not an mRNA vaccine; it's basically just the spike protein presented on an inactive substrate mixed with some preservatives/immune system agonists. A spike protein kebab, if you will.

2ejacob
Oh and add on to this some Israeli cousins (who all received Pfizer), at least 7? With the same side effects. I haven't really taken stock of this before, but given how many people I know have received a vaccination the lack of reported long-term effects seems like a notable signal.

https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038

Here is an extremely long post by a science writer which i haven't read, but I've heard him in reasonable-sounding discussions with actual biologists. Maybe what you are looking for is here.

6[anonymous]
I continue to state that most of what is being said by absolutely anyone about furin (and synonymous codon choice, in this case) to support lab ideas is simply nonsense.  There is nothing particularly interesting at all about the genetics.

Somewhat ironically, I read the title of this article as "[being called] bad names make[s] you open the box [and let out the misaligned AGI]" so I was kind of expecting an explainer on how an AI could bully someone into increasing its ability to affect the physical world. Fortunately just a sentence or two corrected me and I still have high trust in LW article titles.

"[being called] bad names make[s] you open the box [and let out the misaligned AGI]"

AI: "Hey, Eliezer!"

Eliezer: "What?"

AI: "Open the box!"

Eliezer: "No way."

AI: "Please open the box?"

Eliezer: "Nope."

AI: "There are thousands of people dying literally every second. I could save them..."

Eliezer: "That is horrible, but letting out a misaligned AGI could be much worse."

AI: "I am simulating thousand copies of you in the same situation, and each of them gets tortured horribly if they don't open the box. What makes you so sure you are outside my simulation?"

Eliezer... (read more)

1Measure
Haha, same. Though I had actually forgotten what I had thought the title meant until I read this. (I went from the above interpretation to "probably interesting" and opened the article, and by the time I got around to reading it, it was indeed interesting, but I didn't notice the prediction error.)

I would nudge your assessment of the missile defense capabilities of aircraft carriers up a bit. Part of the reason the Iron Dome doesn't intercept everything is because Hamas launches a large number of rockets at the same time to overwhelm the system. This is easier to do when the rockets are cheap and the target distances are short. A comparable number of anti ship missiles are probably harder to fire simultaneously without deploying a large air fleet, in which case you are kind of meeting the carrier on its own terms. Longer range strikes also means gre... (read more)

6lsusr
You have several good points here. I think the most important one is that shorter distances makes missiles harder to shoot down. The 90%-95% number does not include rockets which fell short and landed in Gaza. The 95% number comes from the Israeli armed forces (the 90% came from the Associated Press) so I expect it to make them look as good as possible which means the remaining 5% probably weren't aimed at unoccupied areas. According to this article the cost of an Israeli interceptor missile is $40,000-$50,000. So even if they shoot down 100% of incoming missiles it still costs 50× more to shoot down a missile than to fire one. On the one hand, the attack missiles in question are unusually cheap. On the other hand, more expensive missiles are probably harder to shoot down. On the other other hand, much of that money goes things other than defense. Tanner Greer has better analyses of Taiwan's defensive capabilities than I can write. My guess is there are many reasons you wouldn't want to train your population in guerrilla warfare. For starters, it basically amounts to training terrorists in your own country.

An interesting point. I'm very unsure of this, but I think that the main difference between IV and V is that V includes measures to prevent introduction of Martian life to Earth. The mission to collect the prepared samples would certainly be a category V according to my understanding. Perhaps the crew or lander collecting the samples would first have to do some sort of examination, assuming Perseverance hadn't already?

I am very glad to hear this, and I didn't know that JPL even did life detection! Thank you for commenting.

One could buy up s diverse portfolio of seeds of endangered plants/frozen embryos of endangered animals, focusing on ones with medicinal/industrial value or ecological importance.

1JohnGreer
That's a cool idea! It'd be funny to have an index fund of the top n rare species. I wonder if anyone is doing/can do this now.

I think the metaphor is that raisins are (reasonably) healthy but adding them to cookies won't make cookies healthy.

My hypothesis after 30 seconds of thinking was that trees evolve independently because height = good for competing for sunlight, while grasses must specialize a ton to 'afford' passing up on the height advantage. So once a grass is established somewhere it might be hard for an up-and-coming-almost-grass species to nudge out of its niche. Maybe this is related?

I could imagine lots of plants getting stuck in a local maximum of fitness where they are still pretty tree-like but would need to simultaneously lose some tree features and gain C4 photosynthesis in order to succeed as grasses, so the gap to jump in adaptation-space is too large.

6Zac Hatfield-Dodds
Height is also useful for reducing impact of fires, herbivores, some parasites, etc.; and gives you substantially better volume-of-airflow-over-leaves which can be helpful - a flat sheet of leaf-material would underperform substantially for respiration, even before considering the variable angle of sunlight for photosynthesis. With some handwaving, we seem to agree that "the absence of trees becoming grass-like indicates that there's no nice/large path in evolution-trajectory-space which is continuously competitive" and I'm gesturing towards the known-to-be-difficult C3/C4 distinction as a potentially-relevant feature of that space. Note that while our non-expert speculation might turn up interesting relevant considerations, the space is very complicated and high-dimensional, and I at least have very little data or subject matter expertise. I therefore expect my analysis to be wrong, though I do enjoy and learn from doing it.

The airport near Tel-Aviv is called Ben-Gurion, not -Guri, but IDK if this is intentional to make it clear it's an alternate universe or something.

I love all of your fiction. My favorite part of this piece is the "1" in the title because it implies there will be sequels. :)

3lsusr
Fixed the airport. Also thanks.

There are two reasons why this number is so large: 1) Scott made a lot of predictions and 2) Scott is a very good predictor.

To address #1, you can take Nth root of this number where N is the total number of predictions made. This gives you scott's edge vs randomness per each prediction (on average)

1Jan Christian Refsgaard
you mean the N'th root of 2 right?, which is what I called the null predictor and divided Scott predictions by in the code: random_predictor = 0.5 ** len(y) which is equivalent to 0.5N where N is the total number of predictions

I'm not aware of any existing "dog culture" that is passed between generations, but I'm not aware of any reason it's impossible either. I suppose wolf packs might teach the young adaptations relevant to local conditions, but it's not clear to me how to use that hypothetical evidence.

3Viliam
Imitation seems like an important part of teaching/learning, and apes have famously high ability to imitate, and humans are the best imitators among the apes. This may put a limit on how difficult concepts a species can transfer to the next generation. Humans love copying what others do, and that may be useful at learning habits that are not immediately useful, so the learning at the beginning is not rewarded by anything other than being intrinsically desirable. Also, training animals is difficult; I probably couldn't teach a dog to communicate. How much would belonging to the same species help the dog to teach its puppies?

My dog does this unusual roundhouse butt attack when she's playing with other dogs. It's unusual enough that people comment on it.

I've definitely noticed other dogs start doing it too after playing with her a bunch.

There also SEEMS to be a thing where in e.g. Berkeley the dogs at the park play quietly. I wondered how they taught their dogs not to bark while playing, because this is NOT the case in midwest dog parks. But apparently it's "cultural". If the dogs don't bark at the dog park you frequent, your dog will also not bark.

If the folk wisdom of "pigs are smarter than dogs" is true, this suggests it should be possible to get a pig perspective on the pork industry. Could be a big deal for animal rights (but it's also highly likely that a pig/cow/etc taught how to say "please don't eat me" will be ignored or rationalized away like everything else).

There would either be a 0 month delay or an infinite month delay, depending on whether or not any institutions survived the initial panic. :)

This is the correct answer AFAIK - several lab leaks of smallpox samples after eradication caused most of the remaining samples to be consolidated into a few secure locations. 

Also, the US military is not the only military to vaccinate; some countries can also give their soldiers injections without officially saying what's inside them.

I can't wait to see their response to my invitations 😃

Other competing sources of energy, the worst case scenario is acceptable.

I read this was a nod to the status quo bias of nuclear regulators. Millions(?) Of quality-adjusted life-years lost per year from fossil fuels are basically ignored in the cost benefit analysis.

Being a Gallant is about communicating the message which is most likely to make sense to your recipient, not the message that best appeals to you for some reason. I suspect it is a skill like any other and is best improved simply through regular practice. Post-mortems on failed communications is also likely to be helpful, if only to prevent future mistakes of the same kind. Eventually, one who has fully embodied Gallant will do a pre-mortem before every attempt at communication, iteratively improving their draft message before communicating the best possible signal they can produce. 

Possibly! A game of Hanabi is cooperative, but the meta-game of playing repeated games of Hanabi as an online community may not be.

1Randomized, Controlled
Even if the meta-game is strictly (or just largely) cooperative, I think there could still be a dynamic where someone plays poorly or ambiguously, and then gets off on thinking that the other players were the ones in the wrong. It's a way to gain self-regard.  Normally, I would think this is an unlikely strategy for someone to take, but if you see someone who's been shitting on other people for weeks, it does raise the question: what are you getting out of this?

No other examples come to mind, which is one reason I thought to write the post on Hanabi. I have not heard of The Mind but it sounds like a somewhat surreal experience.

1ahong
I find Hanabi to be a simple way to challenge my bias that other individuals will arrive at a similar conclusion as I, even with imperfect information. The simplicity of the scoring mechanism provides discrete, actionable information that can provide a narrative that, yes, I can improve the quality and consistency of my interpersonal communication. For me, Hanabi is a meditative process of self-reflection. To read that Goofus not only can compartmentalize two pages of negative feedback but also can stay strict to the "correct informal conventions" is eye-opening. It sounds like an unpleasant process for both Goofus and the teammates. Given the fact that there are many other games/exercises that offer a higher reliability for engines, perhaps Goofus is looking in Hanabi for that one partner that can understand him 100%, without his needing to evaluate his communication process. How can one be a Gallant?

It's both, if I understand your question. Having covid gives some resistance that declines over time (intentionally vague phrasing since research on this is ongoing) so recovered cases have less need for a vaccine and from a public health perspective offer less benefit than vaccinating an immunonaive person, if you can only choose one. In addition, giving people with strong immunity even more doses exposes them to needless risk, so recovered cases get only one.

Hey Zvi - What do you make of the Ted Cruz-reporter spat when he refused to put on a mask? I have mixed feelings, because I think he obviously has the wrong motivation (annoying the social distance warriors for its own sake) but accidentally expressed a reasonable idea (specifically, "we should not reasonably fear infection from vaccinated individual, especially when there is the option of stepping away," and more generally, "leave the vaccinated the hell alone!")

Cruz was speaking to a TV audience and was essentially right.

Related fact: Israeli vaccine policy has been to deny vaccines to recovered coronavirus patients for at least 3 months and then give only one dose. Despite the relative success of vaccine distribution there, there was still scarcity at the time this was developed, so this would indicate that the authorities judged the benefit (from a public health standpoint) of giving one dose to an immunonaive person to be equal to that of giving one dose to a recovered case after a 3+ month period.

1AnthonyC
I'm a little unclear on the biology, but its that just a matter of scarcity, or also a matter of expecting a stronger reaction/more side effects? I would think if having had covid gives you more protection than having gotten the first shot of a vaccine, then your reaction on getting a vaccine is likely to be stronger, and waiting might be valuable even just on that basis?

You could add some other scented ingredient to both peptide and control solutions. Rosewater would be a pleasant option. I wouldn't expect this to interfere with any immune responses too much, but you should do some research to check if you decide to try this.

Another brief update: I had a routine blood test yesterday so a doctor in my family added a prescription for the covid spike antibody test (the spike protein is the intended target of the novavax vaccine). I tested positive for the antibody. This is strong evidence I either received the vaccine or had an asymptomatic infection at some point.

A brief update: I woke up with systemic muscle pain and a moderate temperature increase. Looks like I got the real thing.

1ejacob
Another brief update: I had a routine blood test yesterday so a doctor in my family added a prescription for the covid spike antibody test (the spike protein is the intended target of the novavax vaccine). I tested positive for the antibody. This is strong evidence I either received the vaccine or had an asymptomatic infection at some point.
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