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All of Venusian's Comments + Replies

Announcing the Introduction to ML Safety course
Venusian30

This course looks excellent! I'm finishing up my ML master's degree in a few weeks, so it comes at a perfect time for me to get into AI safety in the interim period between graduation and starting at a job.

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Hammertime Day 5: Comfort Zone Expansion
Venusian30

I'm a lifelong lurker on all things social media, which is something I'd like to change. In the past 20 minutes I've made various comments (Reddit, Steam review, etc.), sent some messages to strangers and wrote a Tweet. It may not be much, but it's more than I've done in the whole past year. I hope to continue this and grow into someone who enjoys contributing and interacting in online communities.

Thank you for this post!

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4alkjash
That's great to hear, I've been slowly working on this myself in recent years. E.g., it's greatly improved my gaming experience - from being a total lurker to engaging with Discords, posting bugs and suggestions, occasionally writing Steam guides - it's enriching for sure.
I'm going to help you quit Facebook with some science
Venusian*30

Like someone else mentioned, this technique could work for other things. I don't use Facebook. I used a slightly modified version of this technique on my Youtube watch history and came to a ratio of about 1:20 (bad videos do tend to be shorter, so time wise it's probably 1:10 or so).

I've been trying to reduce my usage for a while, with moderate success. According to RescueTime I spend 32 hours on youtube.com in the past 30 days, and 49 hours in the 30 days before that. I'll keep in mind the poor good:bad ratio from now on and I'll report back in another 30... (read more)

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My Model of the New COVID Strain and US Response
Venusian40

Suppose, as you say, some of this nonlinearity is already factored into the 70% estimate, that would imply that the 'real' number is even higher. For some interaction, like having a face to face conversation without any protection, the probability of an infection may have increased by 100% or even more.

I'm also not an expert. Intuitively this seems like a big step with just a handful of mutations.

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2TheMajor
I agree that this means particular interactions would have a larger risk increase than the 70% cited (again, or whatever average you believe in). In the 24-minute video in Zvi's weekly summary Vincent Racaniello makes the same point (along with many other good points), with the important additional fact that he is an expert (as far as I can tell?). The problem is that this leaves us in the market for an alternative explanation of the UK data, both their absolute increase in cases as well as the relative growth of this particular variant as a fraction of all sequenced COVID samples. There are multiple possible but unlikely explanations, such as superspreaders, 'mild' superspreaders along with a 'mild' increase in infectiousness, or even downright inflated numbers due to mistakes or political motives. To me all of these sound implausible, but if the biological prior on a mutation causing such extreme differences is sufficiently low they might still be likely a postiori explanations. I commented something similar on Zvi's summary, but I don't know how to link to comments on posts. It has a few more links motivating the above.
My Model of the New COVID Strain and US Response
Venusian30

rtnew=1.7 is an entirely different case. Suppressing it would require the sort of lockdown that would yield rt=0.6 for the old strain,

Is this valid reasoning? Intuitively I'd expect current measures to be more effective for a more infectious strain, so that it would require a lockdown that would yield something closer to 0.8 for the old strain.

I suspect that some measures will remain close to 100% effective, like not seeing family members and friends. Similarly some things physically can't become more infective, like being infected by your partner.

In that ... (read more)

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8TheMajor
I had a long discussion on this very topic, and wanted to share my thoughts somewhere. So why not here. Disclaimer: I am not an expert on any of this. The scaling assumption (if the new strain has an R of 1.7 when the old one has an R of 1, then we need countermeasures pulling the old one down to 0.6 to get the new one to 0.6 * 1.7 = 1) is almost certainly too pessimistic an estimate, but I have no clue by how much. A lot of high risk events (going to a concert, partying with 10+ people in a closed room for an entire night, having a multiple hour Christmas dinner with the entire family) will become less than linearly more risky. I interpreted the "70%" (after some initial confusion) to represent an increase in risk per event or unit time of exposure. But if you are sharing the same air with possibly contagious people for a long period of time your risk is all the way on the saturated end of the geometric distribution, and it simply can't go above 100%. So high risk events will likely stay high risk events. At the same time, I expect a lot of medium and low risk events to become almost proportionally more risky. This includes events like having one or two people over for dinner while keeping the room properly ventilated, going to supermarkets, going to the office and using public transport. Something that has been bugging me is that the increase in R-value has been deduced from the actual increased rate at which it spreads, so it is simply not possible that every activity has less than 70% (or whatever number you believe in) increased risk, since that is apparently the population average under the UK lockdown level 2 conditions. So some of this nonlinearity has already been factored in, making it very difficult to say what stronger lockdowns would mean. In conclusion, I think it is possible that even if the new variant is 70% more transmissible that lockdown conditions that would have pushed the old strain down to 0.7 or only 0.8 might be sufficient to contain th
Covid 12/24: We’re F***ed, It’s Over
Venusian10

I wonder if the sudden increase is not just the result of some holiday or cold weather some time before. What are the chances that a new strain would dramatically increase daily cases in two countries within a few days of each other. Notably it started to increase in the Netherlands a few days before the UK. If anything this would point to it coming from a third country, yet it would still be odd that the outbreaks progress roughly in the same manner.

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