"LaMDA is indeed, to use a blunt (if, admittedly, humanizing) term, bullshitting.¹² That’s because, in instructing the model to be “sensible” and “specific” — but not specific in any specific way — bullshit is precisely what we’ve requested." -Blaise Aguera y Arcas
Is anyone taking the perspective that extreme lock down for >6 months is worse than the slight chance of permanent disability and death?
I have a social bubble that’s about 100 people which still represents social distancing via a 95% reduction in my real social interactions. I have hosted multiple outdoor parties confirmed as not super spreading events, including one favorably reviewed by the lead contact tracer for San Mateo County. I regularly get food delivery and eat in outdoor restaurants. I’ve been to the Black Rock Desert for four weekends this y...
I got bogged down on my other company and Color expanded to West Oakland and East Oakland with free next day testing so I missed executing on the immediate business opportunity and the state of covid testing is much better than it was two months ago.
LAMP is still the best way for a citizen scientist to do their own Covid-19 testing. I’m reevaluating this business and may end up coming back to it, possibly with more of a focus on facilitating testing for events.
The culture of local areas here varies enormously in California. Rural California is full of anti mask Republicans and indoor dining is open. I ate inside of an empty French Chinese restaurant in Contra Costa County two weeks ago. Parties on the delta have been wilder than ever over the course of the summer because there was nothing else to do.
In SF and Berkeley, people give you weird looks for not wearing a mask, in Oakland outside of the hot spots people don’t really care.
Politics towards strict lockdowns seem to overlap pretty strictly with liberal social justice advocating attitudes.
It’s important to sample people from all severities of COVID-19 include “asymptomatic”. It seems likely that the mildest cases of COVID-19 come with no long term disability and that of course being intubated for a month on a cocktail of fentanyl, propofol, and valium comes with serious long term consequences. The question then is how severe and likely are chronic health problems of young to middle aged vitamin d sufficient people that experience Covid-19 with severity somewhere between a regular cold and flu.
I think until recent throughput issues PCR was basically good enough and some scientists were attached to their hard learned PCR skills, LAMP was new and scary and unfamiliar enough that lots of scientists just didn’t know it was easier and better. Primer design was a serious obstacle in the early days of LAMP but is easy with modern computer primer design tools.
LAMP is also only better than PCR for the things that it is better at. PCR has general applications to biological science and LAMP is only good for an important subset of possible PCR diagnostic te...
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2009787?query=RP is one of the primary sources.
I like the theory that this coronavirus is a blood disease that just mostly seems to hit the lungs because it causes respiratory symptoms.
Diabetes and metabolic syndrome and heart disease seem like the most significant risk factors for serious covid19 cases. I haven't noticed the weight of patients being noted in any of the primary sources on this, but I strongly suspect that most are obese or at least overweight.
The last recession didn't have a major impact on society. The job market was tough for a few years, but the inevitable progress of technology sent the stock market to all time highs while things continued on as before.
This recession calls into question many of the basic tenets of capitalism. What does it say about the basis of the monetary system if rent and mortgages could be suspended for 6 months with essentially no consequences? The society that comes out of this in a few years may look quite different than the one before as this could be a cataly...
I'm considering a long form post against society wide quarantine and towards individual freedom. Given successful curve flattening everywhere outside of NYC, where it's possible that 80% of people have had the virus, huddling in fear has increasing costs over time and human life is not neccessarily of more value than the protection of human rights. It's incredible to see how easily a populace has been totally pacified.
Is anyone willing to share anecdotes about how they've broken quarantine in small ways? I've noticed some community...
Covid is traumatic enough that I have no desire to retell the story annually, especially with an emphasis on my least favorite part, large group video calls. There seems to be a subset of people that find video calls really socially satisfying and a subset that's about as large that gets very little value from video as a replacement for in person social encounters. I keep noticing that the people that like video calls project this enjoyment of video calls onto the people that just find them depressing.
Also Passover already occurs annually and happened at the peak of fear during the coronavirus pandemic. This holiday may be redudant anyway with the likely adapations of Rationalist Seder?
Dose matters enormously. Hydroxychloroquine is acutely toxic to humans, so using hydroxychloroquine requires you to balance its toxicity versus its antiviral effects. My read of the evidence is that it is ineffective to harmful at the late stages of COVID19 in the dosages high enough to "do something", but taken in the very early stage of the disease (asymptomatic) it might keep the virus contained to its area of initial infection and prevent the disease from migrating to the lungs.
I thought the original builds of this used 5500k bulbs instead of 4000k bulbs.
If you aren't price sensitive, I would try kitting this out with programmable wifi RGB LED lights. That many LED lights in close proximity to each other can create cool effects and you could make a more pleasant light palate by having each bulb at a different color temperature, or having them change to simulate the... sun.
An AI with a goal of killing or "preserving" wild animals to reduce suffering is dangerously close to an AI that kills or "preserves" humans with the goal of reducing suffering. I think negative utilitarianism is an unhelpful philosophy best kept to a thought experiment.
I'd like to test a hypothesis around mental health and different moral philosophies as I slowly work on my post claiming that negative utilitarians have co-opted the EA movement to push for animal rights activism. Has anyone done Less Wrong survey statistics before and can easily look for correlates between dietary choice, mental health, and charities supported?
I've started saying that we are already firmly in the era of transformative AI and I don't thing transformative is the right word for singularity or singleton sorts of speculative AI. That rate of transformation has plenty of space to accelerate, but I like this framing because of the trend of defining AI as whatever doesn't exist yet. Plenty of real AI has remade the world and our lives already; it seems like an improper redefinition of the word transformative to say we aren't there yet.
Is what you describing as "tipping point AI&...
Other things worth trying are infrared saunas and infrared heaters.
I think it's great people engineered a solution that works for their seasonal affective disorder, but I'm skeptical this is a long term population level treatment. I am biased by how subjectively unpleasant I find such lighting systems. In terms of the true physiology of the human body, the visual light energy of the sun impacts the body much less than infrared and ultraviolet light. Therefore, a true treatment for SAD suggests light therapy on non visual spectrums.
An infrared hea...
Probably more like $3500 in the Bay Area.
Lasik circa 2013 is way, way, way better than Lasik circa 2003. It's mostly done by machine based on a precalculated map of your eye. Correcting higher order aberrations improves aspects of your vision that can't be improved by glasses or contacts. To me, this feels like vastly improved 3d vision resolution. I can see the intricate structure of the leaves of trees much better than before.
The cost is reasonable enough when amortized over a decade. Lasik sort of wears off over time, so worst case, plan on getting you...
1) There isn't that much of a pragmatic difference between whether the money is going to the workshop cost or to keep the CFAR doors open year round. CFAR needs to keep the doors open year round in order to continue to be able to host workshops and keep developing and refining curriculum. The venues and food are always great, but not $1000/night nice.
2) There's something about the weekend retreat format that allows for a really strongly transformative experience. Your time at a CFAR workshop somehow feels more significant than your time in everyday life, ...
Agreed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amfonelic_acid , an incredibly potent dopamine reuptake inhibitor, was discovered while investigating antibiotics.
See this (somewhat unreasonable) speculation from Paul Graham that bitcoin was created by a government. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423
Can you please stop with this meta discussion?
I banned the last discussion post on the Basilisk, not Eliezer. I'll let this one stand for now as you've put some effort into this post. However, I believe that these meta discussions are as annoyingly toxic as anything at all on Less Wrong. You are not doing yourself or anyone else any favors by continuing to ride this.
The reputational damage to Less Wrong has been done. Is there really anything to be gained by flipping moderation policy?
At this point, let's not taunt people with the right kind of mental pathology to be made very uncomfortable by the basilisk or meta-set of basilisks.
The reputational damage to Less Wrong has been done. Is there really anything to be gained by flipping moderation policy?
The basilisk is now being linked on Marginal Revolution. Estimated site traffic: >3x gwern.net; per above, that is >16k uniques daily to the site.
What site will be next?
The reputational damage to Less Wrong has been done. Is there really anything to be gained by flipping moderation policy?
Answering the rhetorical question because the obvious answer is not what you imply [EDIT: I notice that J Taylor has made a far superior reply already]: Yes, it limits the ongoing reputational damage.
I'm not arguing with the moderation policy. But I will argue with bad arguments. Continue to implement the policy. You have the authority to do so, Eliezer has the power on this particular website to grant that authority, most people don'...
At this point, let's not taunt people with the right kind of mental pathology to be made very uncomfortable by the basilisk or meta-set of basilisks.
As far as I can tell the entire POINT of LW is to talk about various mental pathologies and how to avoid them or understand them even if they make you very uncomfortable to deal with or acknowledge. The reasons behind talking about the basilisk or basilisks in general (apart from metashit about censorship) are just like the reasons for talking about trolley problems even if they make people angry or unhappy...
The reputational damage to Less Wrong has been done. Is there really anything to be gained by flipping moderation policy?
There's now the impression that a community of aspiring rationalists — or, at least, its de-facto leaders — are experiencing an ongoing lack of clue on the subject of the efficacy of censorship on online PR.
The "reputational damage" is not just "Eliezer or LW have this kooky idea."
It is "... and they think there is something to be gained by shutting down discussion of this kooky idea, when others' experience (...
The reputational damage to Less Wrong has been done. Is there really anything to be gained by flipping moderation policy?
I hate to use silly symmetrical rhetoric, however:
The secret has been leaked and the reputational damage is ongoing. Is there really anything to be gained by continuing the current moderation policy?
Gregor in Berkeley is a take out French restaurant in Berkeley available to franchise. La Note, Berkeley’s not overpriced French restaurant, went brunch only after the pandemic!