All of NormanPerlmutter's Comments + Replies

Things are getting scary with the Trump regime. Rule of law is breaking down with regard to immigration enforcement and basic human rights are not being honored.

I'm kind of dumbfounded because this is worse than I expected things to get. Do any of you LessWrongers have a sense of whether these stories are exaggerated or if they can be taken at face value?

Deporting immigrants is nothing new, but I don't think previous administrations have committed these sorts of human rights violations and due process violations. 

Krome detention center in Miami ... (read more)

The meetup is over for today. 

Hi everybody, it looks like LessWrong made a new account for me in connection with this meetup, rather than using my existing account. Moderators, please put this event under my main account, NormanPerlmutter.

One point that is being glossed over in this essay is that teaching is a difficult skill that is not as strongly correlated with comprehensive expert knowledge of the content than one might think. I say this as someone who worked as a teacher for 6 years.

Part of the process of developing expertise in a field of study is "chunking." The expert mind sees lots of complex things together as a single chunk (which can be unpacked if necessary) whereas the beginner sees the individual pieces. This chunking helps experts to interact with other experts and to apply... (read more)

I just downloaded MS Edge so that I could use Bing AI and ask it to find me a Brazillian hammock more than 6 feet wide.  After repeated questioning, it kept giving me hammocks less than 6 feet wide (but more than 6 feet long). Even after I pointed out its error explicitly it kept making the same error and finally Bing gave up and told me it couldn't help. Like it would list two possibilities for me, state the length and width of each, and the width was less than 6 feet in each case.

Given all the amazing stuff we've seen out of AI lately, I'm kind of a... (read more)

Since nobody has called it . . . I spotted the (intentional?) linguistic joke in one of the section headers. The Hebrew word that sounds like Llama means "why."

I've met humans who are unable to recognize blatant inconsistencies. Not quite to the same extent as Bing Chat, but still. Also, I'm pretty sure monkeys are unable to recognize blatant inconsistencies, and monkeys are intelligent.

I agree that this is a risk, but I'm not sure whether it's the main risk. Another risk is that if somebody gets access to the encrypted store, they can use it to steal all your passwords.

I read a lot of Derek Lowe early in the pandemic and regard him highly, but in this case I think he's wrong. Going through the comments of Lowe's post, I came across a link to this essay by a distinguished biologist, Stephen Salzberg, at Johns Hopkins agreeing with Zvi's perspective. 

http://genome.fieldofscience.com/2022/10/gain-of-function-experiments-at-boston.html

Salzberg is a computational biologist, not a virologist, but he's a distinguished professor at a prestigious school and does not seem to be on the fringe politically as far as I can tell &... (read more)

This is a fascinating essay that made me think of some of my personal experiences with having my boundaries violated in a new light. Thank you.

You pointed out that just asking for consent can be costly. I think an important social/communication/culture technology to consider is how to make consent requests less costly and/or less frequently necessary, while still allowing a strong social norm around consent.. For instance, having meta-discussions about consent with your friends or meta-rules about consent in your social group or community, that are organized in such a way that asking for consent is seen as easy. Giving close friends broad consent to a wide range of acts, and occasionally checking in on that over time. Etc.

I agree that living conditions are better today than several decades ago and worse today than 3 years ago.

That being said, I have seen a lot of mixed evidence and arguments about long covid and haven't figured out how to best think about it.

I'm confused by your use of "no longer" above. I don't believe we have ever lived in such a world., even before covid. We live in such a world to less of an extent now than we did before. Covid is one more thing that sometimes doesn't turn out ok in the end. But there are many other such thing, including many other diseases.

Thanks.

Could you provide more details on getting Paxlovid? My understanding was that it was only authorized for people with certain health conditions.

I agree that the degree of air circulation within the terminal is an important factor. I'm not certain that the terminal is safer than the plane, but I think more likely than not the terminal is safer.

This link from my previous comment is not exactly a peer reviewed article, but it suggests that the difference in air replacement rate in a well-ventilated versus poorly-ventilated space (the terms they use for mixture of the air, not for air change rate) is only about a factor of 3. Of course, there are different degrees of poor ventilation.

I would be really interested to hear the perspective of somebody with greater expertise in the relevant engineering and physics.

Airplanes do an excellent job circulating air, and are relatively safe places to be. Your risk in the terminal and the taxi greatly exceeds your risk on the plane.

I used to agree with this. But I recently realized it likely isn't true. Consider the following:

• The time to remove an airborne contaminant depends on the Air Change Rate (measured in Air Changes per Hour, or ACH) and how well the air is mixed in the space.
• Air in an airplane cabin has an air change rate of about 13 to 15 ACH. (Actually, the one paper linked in this bullet makes my overall ar

Regarding more people declining the second shot than the first shot, my best guess would be that people took the first shot, and either they themselves or one of their acquaintances had an extremely bad side effect, either actual or perceived, so they decided not to take the second shot. I know one person who followed this reasoning. Her husband fell ill after his vaccination with unclear causes, and she attributed it to the vaccine. She finally did decide to get her second shot and booster recently.

Another possibility could be that some financial incentives incentivized the first shot but not the second shot.

Well, the electric eraser was maybe a slight improvement over my manual eraser when I use both together, but not enough to really solve my problem. I went back to using mostly the manual one as it's more convenient.

I just found out that electric erasers are a thing. (Similar to an electric toothbrush, but an eraser.) I have ordered a high-end electric eraser, going to see whether it helps me to do better using my current paper and pencil setup.

Anecdotal, but similar -- when I used to play in chess tournaments, I had a sense that I performed better and made fewer errors when I had more sleep, to the point of aiming for 9 or so hours of sleep the night before a tournament.

Cool idea, I like the historic and low-tech aspect. I will look into it.

I love blackboards, I was a research mathematician for many years and they have a special place in my heart along with a stick of Hagoromo chalk.  But they don't fit my purposes here for much the same reasons as dry erase boards -- they erase accidentally and don't allow for small writing.

I'm not familiar with them and am curious to learn more. My main concern would be whether they allow for fine-scale writing and erasing, since I am writing in small print with lines close together and erasing line by line. Is there a particular brand that you would recommend?

How is the older version better than the newer version (other than meedstrom's comment)?

Thanks. This is similar to what I'm looking for, but a bit too small. I'd prefer something the size of an 8.5x11 sheet of paper,  but I might give Remarkable a try. 

I just quickly browsed this post. Based on the overall topic, you might also be interested in these inconsistency results in infinitary utiliatarianism written by my PhD advisor (a set theorist) and his wife (a philosopher).

http://jdh.hamkins.org/infinitary-utilitarianism/

I'm curious to learn more about the thesis that caffeine or other stimulant use can completely mitigate the effects of sleep deprivation until 30+ hours without sleep. My own (subjective, anecdotal) experience with caffeine is that occasional (once or twice a week) caffeine use fairly effectively mitigates occasional sleep deprivation if I got say 5-6 hours of sleep the night before as opposed to my preferred 7-8, but is not too effective if I slept less than 4 hours the night before.  The more often I use caffeine, the less effective the caffeine bec... (read more)

What was your old job, and what is your current job?

"If we add all the percentage point increases (i.e. how many more percentage points serology positive participants experienced persistent symptoms vs serology negative participants - data from table 2) then we get 20.3%." 

I am not sure whether this reasoning is correct. It seems to be dependent on how the symptoms are categorized. For instance, suppose we divided fatigue into moderate fatigue and severe fatigue. The increased probability for each might be 5%, and then you would get 25.3% rather than 20.3%. Or suppose we combined fatigue and poor atten... (read more)

Looks like Zvi just wrote a whole post in response to the healthdata.org update. In particular, January 19 was his prediction of a peak of reported cases, not of actual cases. 

This is true to an extent. Unvaccinated people are still able to attend. They just would need to forge their vaccination card. I think this is not particularly hard to do, though it's not trivially easy and many unvaccinated people would not do it for ethical reasons.

Thank you, good explanation. But see also my response to tivelen below.

Healthdata.org (the University of Washington team) released a new projection January 8, projecting that cases in the US (actual cases, not reported cases) peaked January 6. Had you seen this already when you wrote this post, and if not, does it impact your projection of a January 19 peak for the US?

(Edit: added hyperlink)

How is that different from what CraigMichael said? Attending that sort of event is a type of risk compensation.

This is a very helpful analysis. I was independently undertaking a similar analysis, and it's nice to have this for comparison. I hadn't thought to exclude pedestrians, pedecyclists, and other non-occupants, nor of excluding single-vehicle crashes.

I think a some important pieces are missing from this analysis, as follows.

1) The final number, 548, is the number of miles that I must drive to accrue one micromort for all passenger vehicle occupants. But I am more interested in how many miles I have to drive to accrue one micromort for myself. The average (mea... (read more)

I have not used microcovid much because I am not confident in its predictions and modeling assumptions, or I don't feel they are clearly enough defined to make the tool useful. The change that would be valuable to me (which I have difficultly operationalizing) would be if Microcovid were improved such that I could be much more confident in its modeling assumptions and could use it without having to try to make lots of guesses about which scenarios are well modeled. Maybe it would be sufficient just to explain which types of assumptions make for robust mode... (read more)

Yes, I agree that this nonstandard definition is a crux for this disagreement. Good analysis.

Hmm, suppose an adult had urinary problems and wetted their bed regularly.  Which category would you say that fits into? Or somebody whose parents had named them something that they didn't like and they changed their name and didn't want others to know their original given name due to aesthetic preferences and social implications of character traits related to that name?

There would be some social harm in sharing this either of these, but would it necessarily be adversarial? Even if others were aligned with the person with the secret, they couldn't help but look at them a bit different knowing the secret.

Could you give an example of exploring un-endorsed emotional reactions? How is this related to having deeply held values?

In this case, sharing it with people who don't know her and will likely never encounter her will do minimal harm, so you might suggest that as an exception to the secret keeping.

Another such case is if sharing something would embarrass somebody. They might be embarrassed in spite of others not acting adversarial towards them. 

I have been thinking about this topic a lot on my own and with friends before finding this post and was excited to see a post so related to my recent thoughts. One idea that came up in a recent discussion with a friend was that the pitfalls of the reasonable good faith effort in connection with common communication norms, especially if somebody reveals a secret accidentally and is feeling vulnerable and then asks you to keep it secret. In that case, if you say, "I'll make a good faith effort to keep it but I can't promise" it may be interpreted as "I don't... (read more)

Are you saying that you agree with William Eden's claim that vaccination does not substantially prevent the spread of covid? Or is that one of the things that you would "quibble" with him on? That point seems much larger than a quibble to me, it's a key point that's being debated currently about public health policy.  My own understanding is that while the vaccines are of course not perfect at preventing spread they do prevent spread to a significant degree, and therefore vaccination is indeed a public health issue not just an individual decision. 

The 97% was in case there was no other strain that comes in. So maybe the 96% is even taking into account another new strain? Or maybe it was just a typo.

There is an important practical consideration that is being left out here.  Attempting to completely devote one's life to these causes in the way described would not necessarily be effective. The best way to devote your life to a cause is not necessarily in a super-fervent way, because that's not how humans work. We need certain types of motivation, we have physical and emotional needs, we suffer from burnout if we work too hard. So if you believe that astronomical suffering risks are the most important issue to work on, then by all means work on them... (read more)

I was linking to a news article on CNBC that quoted the CDC director. in the third paragraph. I didn't take the time to track it back to the CDC directly.

For what it's worth, the CDC reported that side effects to the booster are less compared with the second dose, and that was also my personal experience.

If I understand correctly, Zvi's idea is that vaccine protection against infection has likely gone down, but vaccine protection against severe infection has held nearly constant, so that the vast majority of additional infections among vaccinated people will be non-severe.