Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# Announcing Web-TAISU, May 13-17

**I am excited to announce Web-TAISU!**  
**May 13-17, 2020**

I was going to run a [Technical AI Safety Unconference](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/BPTzfeQeZZ6chHvtr/taisu-technical-ai-safety-unconference-1) (TAISU) at [CEEALAR](https://ceealar.org/) (formerly EA Hotel), Blackpool, UK. Then there was a pandemic. _So instead there will be a Web-TAISU on the Internet._

This is an unconference, which means that the program is participant driven. I do have some backup ideas to put in if there are not enough suggestions from you, but I don’t expect those to be necessary.

I thought a lot about how to adapt this event to be run online, and I am grateful to the participants who took time to discuss this with me. In the end I concluded that I think it would work very well to stick to more or less the same format as the in-person TAISU I organised last year. The main adjustment I made is that the days are shorter, both because online calls tend to be more tiring, and for the event to work well in more timezones.

Web-TAISU is scheduled to happen during daytime for everyone in the Americas and Europe and Africa. I’m sorry everyone else, hopefully you find some hours to join, anyway.

Signup
======

Please do this as soon as possible, to give me an idea of who is coming.

1.  Use [this Omnipotent](https://omnipointment.com/EAM55oo7Vsekm5Rv4el9/respond) to tell me your best guess of when you will be attending Web-TAISU. _**Go there right now and give me your best guess!**_ You can always change it later.
2.  [Create a QiqoChat user](https://qiqochat.com/login)
3.  Join the [AI Safety Circle](https://ais.qiqochat.com/members)
4.  Let others know who you are by filling in your profile

1.  Click on “Profiles”
2.  Click on yourself
3.  Click “Edit”
4.  Add a profile picture - _**Important!**_
5.  Fill in the rest of your profile

[Schedule and Other Information](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AJ67N78A60njFmJPx3UN6ghwP3IRproPeh04DIvtgck/edit#heading=h.3ur1js4vza6m)
=============================================================================================================================================
# How strong is the evidence for hydroxychloroquine?

There has been a lot of discussion of hydroxychloroquine (see the megathread on [Effective Altruism Coronavirus Discussion](https://www.facebook.com/groups/EACoronavirus/permalink/4309765102382572/), note you need to answer two questions to gain access). Doctors treating COVID-19 have rated [hydroxychloroquine](https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/2/hydroxychloroquine-rated-most-effective-therapy-do/) the most effective drug based on their experience. But on the other hand, results have been mixed with a recent RCT showing [no effect](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/03/31/comparing-chloroquine-trials?fbclid=IwAR1d88U59MGUCAs9lzvOHptNudpMBd-JowJf9TvlzFf4Xv3NjOJHrorja34).

At this stage how strong is the evidence for hydroxychloroquine and if it works, how effective does it appear to be as a treatment?

Disclaimer: Please seek medical advice before taking any substance, particularly those like hydroxychloroquine that have known side effects.
# What to draw from Macintyre et al 2015?

Last week it seems the West decided that we should all wear masks and wear cloth masks if we don't have proper masks.

As Scott Alexander pointed [out](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qapqE86xrjQkD8eZ2/april-coronavirus-open-thread?commentId=5BsonZ5kGvAGLCJ2T), [Macintyre et al 2015](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275360639_A_cluster_randomised_trial_of_cloth_masks_compared_with_medical_masks_in_healthcare_workers#pf9) seems to be a only controlled trial of cloth masks and it writes:

> For example, a contaminated cloth mask may transfer pathogen from the mask to the bare hands of the wearer. We also showed that ﬁltration was extremely poor (almost 0%) for the cloth masks. Observations during SARS suggested double-masking and other practices increased the risk of infection because of moisture, liquid diffusion and pathogen retention. These effects may be associated with cloth masks.

I'm not on record for being the biggest fan of [evidence-based medicine](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/5CNs9wmHWFQTNjFKo/p/grQQynyy6Mc4agJxu), but getting everybody to take use a medical intervention based on pathotheoretical reasoning when the paper that provides out best evidence cautions against that intervention is risky.

Why does Macintyre et al 2015 come to so different conclusion about the ability of cloth masks to filter then other studies?

What action could people take to reduce the potential increase risk that Macintyre sees when they don't have better masks?
# What is the impact of varying infectious dose of COVID-19?

[Zvi Mowshowitz](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3ArEA7tHDXQxE6PED/taking-initial-viral-load-seriously) and [Robin Hanson](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/03/variolation-may-cut-covid19-deaths-3-30x.html) have both made pretty provocative proposals around deliberate variolation/low dose exposure to COVID-19, with the goal of reducing total morbidity/mortality and increasing freedom/productivity. Interestingly, the same rough data has led to opposite recommendations:

*   Hanson believes we should inoculate the young and healthy with the goal of developing enough immune individuals that R0 falls below 1.
*   Zvi believes that if low viral load is really so much safer, we should inoculate the least healthy first, to ensure they get the lowest initial dose possible.

Meanwhile in the April Coronavirus Open Thread, [Matthew Lewis suggests](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qapqE86xrjQkD8eZ2/april-coronavirus-open-thread?commentId=w9zZQbp8FSMjAoMvw) inoculating via the GI tract, which may lead to weaker symptoms than the same load in the respiratory system.

The wisdom of both of these proposals is _really sensitive_ to exactly how much benefit stems from how much lower the initial dose (or the placement of the initial dose), and the corresponding risks. With that in mind: what do we already know about the impact of varying infectious doses ? What could we learn that would narrow the confidence intervals? How could we learn more?
# What is going on in Singapore and the Philippines?

Both saw early cases and then seemed to see things level off. Some suggested it was the sensitivity to heat and humidity plus, for Singapore, quick and decisive actions to limit the spread.

Both are now looking almost like they are at the start of their outbreak.

Any clues as to why or if this largely refutes the seasonal claims (not sure about Singapore but Philippines is officially in Summer season).
# Being right isn't enough. Confidence is very important.

There are two machines that predict weather. One machine always reports the probability of a storm as 1%, because 1% is the local yearly rate of storms. This machine turns out to be perfectly well calibrated and totally unbiased.

Another machine pays attention to local data, and processes it in a clever way. It always gives numbers like either 98% or 0.05%, depending on the day. Impressively, it also turns out to be perfectly well calibrated and unbiased.

Both are predicting the same category of event, both are perfectly calibrated- the event does happen or fail to happen at the rate they claim it will-, but the confident machine is much more useful than the simpler, low-confidence machine.

Being _right_ and _sane_ means being well calibrated. It imposes no further requirements. Being right and sane is not enough. Moving well in the world requires your predictions to also sometimes be _confident_.

  

Feel the pain of confidence's absence. Imagine that an enemy tank has entered your firing range. You can hear it rolling and occasionally clambering through the foliage, but you can't see it, your night cameras are damaged, however, your network holds a lot of good historical data. You figure out the most likely place for it to be given what you can hear and what you all remember, and you fire in that direction. You make the right choice given the data and the cognitive resources you had available to you. You are following a sound algorithm. Nobody can call you insane. Your record as a predictor will have a perfectly triangular histogram.

You miss. Your enemy's night vision is fine, and so they shoot back at you. Some of your parts can be salvaged but they probably wont be. It would have been really good if you'd had more eyes.
# Kids Ear Protection

Last summer, with the Fourth of July coming up, I ordered ear protection for the kids. I think I got [this blue pair](https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07216RSSL/) and [this red pair](https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01IOWKFV4). They were very effective! In 2018 both kids wanted to go home as soon as the fireworks started, while in 2019 they could enjoy watching them for a while:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/ear-protection-watching-fireworks.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/ear-protection-watching-fireworks-big.jpg)

What I wasn't anticipating, though, was how useful they would be in general. They kids have worn them when helping me work on the house:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/ear-protection-lily-working-on-house.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/ear-protection-lily-working-on-house-big.jpg)

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/ear-protection-anna-working-on-house.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/ear-protection-anna-working-on-house-big.jpg)

When hanging out at the [HONK!](http://honkfest.org/) festival:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/ear-protection-honk.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/ear-protection-honk-big.jpg)

And have generally enjoyed having them as an option any time things are louder than they would like.

I'm glad we got them!

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/10100153342068102)*
# How do you do fit-testing for KN95/N95/FFP2/FFP3 masks?

I have brought FFP3 masks half a year ago and at the time I brought them to get outside and protect myself in enviroments with allergy triggers. It didn't work. At the time I wasn't aware that fit testing is hard as writes:

> **Fit-testing is a laborious task, taking around 30 min to do properly**, and comprises qualitative fit-testing (testing whether the respirator-wearing healthcare worker can taste an intensely bitter or sweet substance sprayed into the ambient air around the outside of the mask) or quantitative fit testing (measuring the ratio of particles in the air inside and outside the breathing zone when wearing the respirator). Attempts have been made to circumvent the requirement for fit testing, and it has been suggested that self-testing for a seal by the respirator wearer (see [http://youtu.be/pGXiUyAoEd8a](http://youtu.be/pGXiUyAoEd8a) for a video demonstration) is a sufficient substitute for fit-testing. However, **self-checking for a seal has been demonstrated to be a highly unreliable technique** in two separate studies so that full fit-testing remains a necessary preliminary requirement before respirators can be used in the healthcare setting.

There are many people who seem to wear masks in this crisis in a way that's doesn't provide as much protection as the mask could theoretically give them.

Having protocol that individuals can use for self-checking that's reliable would be very valuable.

In particular it would be good to know what solutions to use for the smell test. Do you have to take take to use moleculs that have the right size?
# Body Mass and Risk from COVID-19 and Influenza

I've written a blog post on "Body Mass and Risk from COVID-19 and Influenza", available at [https://radfordneal.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/body-mass-and-risk-from-covid-19-and-influenza/](https://radfordneal.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/body-mass-and-risk-from-covid-19-and-influenza/)

Here's the intro:

Understanding the factors affecting whether someone infected with COVID-19 will become seriously ill is important for treatment of patients, for forecasting and planning, and — with factors that can be changed — for personal decisions aimed at reducing risk. Despite our current focus, influenza also remains a serious disease, so understanding its risk factors is also important.

Here, I’ll look at some of the evidence on how body mass — formalized as Body Mass Index (BMI, weight in kilograms divided by squared height in metres) — influences prognosis for respiratory diseases. Information specific to COVID-19 is still scant, but there is more data on influenza and on other respiratory infections (which includes coronaviruses other than COVID-19). Information on how BMI relates to general mortality should also be helpful.

Below, I’ll look at two relevant papers, plus a preliminary report on COVID-19. To preview my conclusions, it seems that being underweight and being seriously obese are both risk factors for serious respiratory illness. Furthermore, it seems that “underweight” should include the lower part of the “normal weight” category as defined by the WHO. Official advice in this respect seems dangerously misleading.
# Problems with p-values

I'm taking a really cool course right now on statistics education, which covers:

* replication

* p-values being bad

* bayesian statistics

* meta-analyses

A lot of our readings are really fun, and I'll likely write more posts based on them, maybe into a "why social science studies are bad" sequence.

Anyway, this is the first entry that goes over into misinterpretations and issues with p-values and null hypothesis significance testing.
# Assessing Kurzweil's 1999 predictions for 2019

**Thanks everyone who volunteered! No longer accepting new volunteers now.**

**Results coming soon.**

![](https://www.dropbox.com/s/lcns2pquftpasr7/2019-predictions.jpg?raw=1)

First of all, I want to thank all the volunteers who agreed to do this assessment. It's important to check the track record, especially in a period when expert predictions are so important and so debated. If you have any questions, add a comment here or PM me on LessWrong.

Logistics:

* Go to this Google form (asking for your name/pseudonym and email) and I will send you a TSV (tab-separated values) file with all 105 questions in random order.
* If you don't want to share your email with me, or share it on a Google form, send me a PM on LessWrong and we'll see what else we can do.

Assessment:

* For each prediction, please answer on a five point scale: 1=True, 2=Weakly True, 3=Cannot decide, 4=Weakly False, 5=False. Use your intuitive assessment of Kurzweil's words if there is ambiguity in them.
* Use your best estimate for the *accuracy* of the prediction only; do not consider how specific or trivial the prediction is. "People will breath oxygen" is true; "there will be a major pandemic in 2018, driving people to quarantine and crashing economies and stock markets" is false or weakly false, because of the specific date. If it said "around 2018", then it would be true or weakly true.
* The prediction is true if it was true in 2019; thus, ignore any recent effects of COVID-19.

Procedure:

* Do predictions on the .tsv file I sent you, adding another column.
* Do them in the order of that file, starting from the top.
* Try and attempt at least 10 predictions.
* Some predictions start with a piece in square brackets []. This is to provide context for the prediction. Ignore it when assessing the accuracy.
* I'll include the ordered list of predictions as a PDF. Use this if you need yet more context on the prediction.
* Once you're done, send me the file back, and I will acknowledge receiving it. If you don't get an acknowledgement in the next two working days, ping me to see if I got it.

Cheers!
# COVID-19 and the US Elections

Saw a news story this morning about possible using mail in ballots for the elections and concerns about it not being a fair process (disadvantaging Republicans). Leaving that aside it does seem that we might want to consider a plan for November just in case. (ROK is running into some difficulties with its upcoming elections it seems.)

I can think of three possible approaches, perhaps others are possible.

1) Use the mail-in function. That is already a legal process but would need to be extended to locally present voters not just those elsewhere. Down side here would seem to be mail in votes are always questioned it seems as potentially fraudulent, perhaps without reasonable cause as well.

So if we decided we still need social distancing for the election mail in votes will accomplish that but will likely delay counting and ultimately identifying the winner as I would expect a lot challenges even in not that close a race -- you need a wide margin where all agree the result was as expected or too big a difference to be counter error or fraud.

If we take that route we probably need to tell everyone to submit their paper work and hire election staff to vet the applications.

2) On-line voting. Well, we do have electronic voting machines. There are certainly ways to make that possible but could it be done in time and securely? Suspect this would both be executed very poorly and be open to even more fraud or other manipulations than mail in voting. It attempted I would expect the final announcement might be even more delayed than for the mail in votes.

3) Election Week rather than Election Day? In this approach nothing changes in the voting process other than reducing the number of people at the polls at any given time -- so the longer period of time for people to cast their vote. Down side is that might require some type of legislation. It would also need to be planned out in advance (by whom?) so everyone knows the date (and perhaps time) when they are allowed to cast their vote.

\[Note, I've not offered any reason why or any estimate on if this would be necessary. I suspect those here can make their own assessments on that. However, this is not something we (the people) would want to wait to the last minute. Additionally, perhaps this would allow the politicians to start focusing on politics rather than pandemics and get them out of the medical experts way ;-) \]
# The Sandwich Argument

Today I saw a very interesting argument pattern.

> Normally I'd expect some evidence for X. I don't think there was any evidence for X apart from Y. So in conclusion, there was no evidence for X.

It's well known that people tend to remember the start and end more than the middle. This pattern is optimised so people to believe there is no evidence for X.

The middle part is where it gets interesting. If the statement had just said that there was no evidence for X then the author would have looked like they were ignorant of Y. It would have left them vulnerable to a comment saying "What about Y?".

Mentioning Y indicates they aren't ill-informed and blocks this obvious reply. But rather than addressing Y, they have merely used some sleight-of-hand. Their argument doesn't really account for Y; it merely pretends to.

Have you seen this pattern before? If so, please comment below.

See also: [Motte and Bailey](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/), [Shit Sandwich](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Shit%20Sandwich)
# [Announcement] LessWrong will be down for ~1 hour on the evening of April 10th around 10PM PDT (5:00AM GMT)

LessWrong's database provider (Mlab) [has been acquired by](https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/10/mongodb-to-acquire-cloud-database-provider-mlab-for-68-million/) a separate company (MongoDB) and as such our database needs to be migrated to that new provider. In order to do that, there will be about half an hour of downtime on Friday (April 10th) between 10PM and 11PM. 

Sorry for the inconvenience.
# Why don't we have active human trials with inactivated SARS-COV-2?

It seems to me that it should be relatively straightforward to grow SARS-COV-2 in vitro and then inactive it via UV radiation.

After we inactivated it we could give it to test subjects to see whether we get a good immune response.

Is there a reason this is more complicated then I think? Have I missed something else? Otherwise what's the reason that there are no such trials going on?
# The Value Is In the Tails

I have a friend who makes a (great) living as a professional gambler. He's originally from outside the US, but was living there during 2016 and, like everyone else in our friend group, started following the election. Since he loves to gamble, he also decided to bet on the election.

I'm not sure what his political leanings are exactly, but he's a sensible guy and made fun of Trump like the rest of us. But he also ended up betting on Trump to win, and won enough money to pay for a trip to Houston to watch the Super Bowl live in January (flights+hotel+tickets...I told you he does well).

When I asked him why he bet on Trump, he said he didn't really understand American politics, but that it seemed extremely complicated, with random things like whether it rains in certain parts of Pennsylvania potentially being important. If it's extremely complicated and arbitrary, then it's probably also hard to model. The projections he saw had the most likely outcome being a moderate win by Hilary, but since he didn't trust the models, he figured the value was in the tails: the models are likely off, which likely affects the tails more than the mean. So a landslide win by Hilary or a Trump victory seemed undervalued by gambling markets. He wished he could hedge his bets by betting on both outcomes (as opposed to a moderate Hilary win), but the only option he had was to bet on Trump to win.

This logic has stuck with me ever since: in the face of large uncertainty, we're probably getting the tails wrong more than the mean. The value is in the tails.

For a fast-moving, highly uncertain crisis -- like COVID-19 --the value being in the tails means that we're probably underestimating the risk. We're probably getting the worst-case scenarios, and the odds of them happening, wrong, and we should be weighing our expectations more heavily towards worst-case scenarios than what models, expert assessments, etc. tell us. The virus could suddenly mutate (like SARS did in a good way), there could be compounding natural disasters, the economic recovery could look more like an L than a U.

I don't claim to know how we should be responding to the epidemic, in terms of stopping the spread of the virus or combating its economic impacts, but whatever we do, we should assume the virus' damage will be worse than we think.
# The History of Color in Chinese

The [linked post](https://www.lsusr.com/blog/history-of-color-in-chinese.html) is better because you can see the colors.

---

Older Chinese characters tend to be simpler. You can use this to measure the relative ages of ancient concepts.

For example, the Chinese characters for colors are:
- 白 white
- 黑 black
- 红 red
- 橙 orange
- 黄 yellow
- 绿 green
- 蓝 blue
- 紫 purple

The simplest characters are written with a single radical. The oldest radicals are all Kangxi radicals. White 白, black 黑 and yellow 黄 are all written with a single Kangxi radical. The other colors contain at least two radicals.

This fits almost perfectly with Lazarus Geiger’s evolutionary progression[^1] which goes black and white ➝ red ➝ yellow ➝ green ➝ blue. The only color out-of-place is red 红.

Wait a minute...I can't recall ever encountering the character "红" in ancient Chinese poetry.

[^1]: For more information about Lazarus Geiger's work, see Chapter 4 of *Through the Looking Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages* by Guy Deutscher.

That's because "红" is a relatively new character for the word "red". The traditional [five colors](https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%BA%94%E5%BD%A9) 青黄赤白黑 use the Kangxi radical "赤" for red instead of "红". Mystery solved!

If we use the ancient character "赤" for red instead of the modern character "红" then the first four colors in Geiger's sequence are all simple Kangxi radicals and the rest are all composite characters with at least two radicals.

# Blue-Green

It gets better. Did you notice how we've only used four of the five colors so far? Take a closer look at the five colors 青黄赤白黑. They include *qīng* 青, the color of nature, spanning blue and green. It is the 5th and 6th color in Geiger's progression. *Qīng* 青 is written with a single Kangxi radical.

If all you have are black, white, red and yellow, and then creating a single new color for blue and green is not unusual.

> Bastian also argued that Tagalog speakers in the Philippines had not even distinguished between green and blue until the arrival of the Spanish colonizers, because the Tagalog words for “green” and “blue” were clearly recent borrowings from Spanish *verde* and *azul*. And he claimed that the language of the Teda tribe in Chad still did not distinguish green from blue at all
>
> ― *Through the Looking Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages* by Guy Deutscher

Today, *qīng* 青 is used in more poetic contexts while green 绿 and blue 蓝 are used in less poetic contexts.
# How should we model complex systems?

By "complex", I mean a system for which it would be too computationally costly to model it from first principles e.g. the economy, the climate (my field, by the way). Suppose our goal is to predict a system's future behaviour with minimum possible error given by some metric (e.g. minimise the mean square error or maximise the likelihood). This seems like something we would want to do in an optimal way, and also something a superintelligence should have a strategy to do, so I thought I'd ask here if anyone has worked on this problem.

I've read quite a bit about how we can optimally try to deduce the truth e.g. apply Bayes' theorem with a prior set following Ockham's razor (c.f. Solomonoff induction). However, this seems difficult to me to apply to modelling complex systems, even as an idealisation, because:

1. Since we cannot afford to model the true equations, every member of the set of models available to us is false, so the likelihood and posterior probability for each will typically evaluate to zero given enough observed data. So if we want to use Bayes' theorem, the probabilities should not mean the probability of each model being true. But it's not clear to me what they should mean - perhaps the probability that each model will give the prediction with the lowest error? But then it's not clear how to do updating, if the normal likelihoods will typically be zero.

2. It doesn't seem clear that Ockham's razor will be a good guide to giving our models prior probabilities. Its use seems to be motivated by it working well for deducing fundamental laws of nature. However, for modelling complex systems it seems more reasonable to me to give more weight to models that incorporate what we understand to be the important processes - and past observations can't necessarily help us tell what processes are important to include, because different processes may become important in future (c.f. biological feedbacks that may kick in as the climate warms). This could perhaps be done by having a strategy for deriving approximate affordable models from the fundamental laws - but is it possible to say anything about how an agent should do this?

I've not found anything about rational strategies to approximately model complex systems rather than derive true models. Thank you very much for any thoughts and resources you can share.
# Worldwide "Portland" Slate Star Codex Meetup

We will be having the "Portland" SSC Meetup on April 26th at 12:30 PM US Pacific Time (UTC-8), via video chat (sorry, I'm not sure how to get rid of the misleading map). We're opening it up to anyone (why not?) so if you're interested in attending, don't worry about your location. To join, send me a message on LessWrong or via email [(nwalton125@gmail.com).]((nwalton125@gmail.com).) I also encourage people to use this thread to say you are coming. Shortly before the meetup starts, I will reply to your message with a link to our Google Meet.

Our meetups are usually agenda-less chatting, often ending up with a focus on SSC posts, or, these days, COVID-19. If people want to do something more specific, please let me know via a comment or personal message! A little while ago, some folks did presentations on specific topics, which attendees seemed to enjoy.

If a lot of people attend, we might split the conversation in to two or more video chats, to allow people to talk more, and about things they are more interested in.
# Are there any naturally occurring heat pumps? 

By that I mean are there any natural phenomena that use a low entropy energy source to move heat against a temperature gradient. I know that there are a lot of things that can be interpreted as heat engines, like hurricanes, but I wanted to know if the opposite also happens in nature.
# The Typing Game

The kids and I play a typing game. I'll be sitting [on the couch](https://www.jefftk.com/p/folding-couch-monitor) with my laptop, and one of them will come over and ask to play. We'll load up [jefftk.com/speak](https://www.jefftk.com/speak):

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/speak-splash-screen.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/speak-splash-screen-big.png)

I'll write something:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/speak-hi-lily.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/speak-hi-lily-big.png)

Then they'll write something:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/speak-hi-jeff.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/speak-hi-jeff-big.png)

Then I'll write something:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/speak-happy-easter.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/speak-happy-easter-big.png)

It only accepts letters, numbers, and a few punctuation marks. As you type it says the letters, and when you press enter it says your whole sentence. There's a history, but once something scrolls off the bottom of the screen it's gone.

Some ways we'll play with it:

*   They'll ask me how to write something, I'll spell it. I'll point out the letters as needed, [as vaguely as I can](https://www.jefftk.com/p/lessons-from-dropping-out).
*   I'll write something, they'll guess at it, then we press enter and find out if they're right.
*   I'll write something, they'll copy it.
*   I'll write a word like 'SAD' and then they'll see if they can modify it to make a related word like 'MAD'.

It uses upper-case and sans-serif because that's what the letters on they keyboard look like.

I got the idea from Daniel's [version](https://3e.org/speak), but rewrote it from scratch to better ignore mistaken inputs. Feel free to copy and modify!
# Where should LessWrong go on COVID?

About 6 weeks ago the LW team chose to go really hard on COVID-19 (including contracting with me), for reasons [discussed here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/J8JvZxkABWwdXSH9d/is-the-coronavirus-the-most-important-thing-to-be-focusing?commentId=okrSYXz6KsrMAw5rL). The time for that seems to be winding down; people-besides-me are asking fewer covid questions and more non-covid questions, my posts get fewer comments every day, and there's not the same urgency adding to the links DB. Looking at people I know in the real world seems much the same: after a mad sprint to prep and then adjust to covid, people are settling in and catching up on the rest of their lives. So I and the LessWrong team are taking this moment to reevaluate what LessWrong’s role in covid response should be.

My question for you is: where do we go from here? Should we slip back to normal, except with a covid section? Relegate covid work to personal posts since it’s not timeless? Do you want practical posts like “how to disinfect a mask?”, or big picture things like “what does the world look like in a year?”?

What would help you, specifically, right now? In a month? In a year?

Answers I’ve gotten from people I polled before posting:

*   Answer questions with answers that can probably be synthesized from academic papers, e.g., “What is my risk from delivery food, given a certain prevalence?”
*   Answer questions informing near-term behavior, e.g., “How do you tell when it's time in your specific region to start relaxing your protocols?” and “Which specific things do we think will be instant vectors the moment things open up?”
*   Creates guides for questions about long-term behavior, e.g., “should plan on hibernating for a year and returning to my job, or retool for something entirely different?”, “should I move out of \[major metropolitan answer\] for a year?”, and “should I move to a more functional country forever?”
*   Dataset on politicians/leaders/journalists etc evaluating how they handled covid
*   A map of current efforts
*   DB of coronavirus data sets

And remember that if you're entirely sick of this, you can use the new filter tool on the frontpage to make sure you never see covid content.
# The Samurai and the Daimyo: A Useful Dynamic? 

The post [Slack Club](https://www.thelastrationalist.com/slack-club.html) by The Last Rationalist describes a problem in the rationalist community where there is an overabundance of Ender Wiggins: people trying to be clever as a way of avoiding having to do work. HPMOR and other rationalist media lionizes this sort of behavior and encourages people to try and fit into this archetype while looking down on people who don't. [Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FzD7pNm9X68Gp5ZC/why-our-kind-can-t-cooperate) from the Craft and the Community sequence also points to the same general cluster of behavioral trends. I'm not saying this is universal, but there does seem to be something to it.

I've probably been influenced by this myself. Over the years I have collected a large pile of various failed or aborted projects in my wake. Things that just didn't work out or didn't go the way I had planned or hoped. As a result, it's become increasingly clear to me that I just don't make a very good Ender Wiggin. I'm at least getting decent at _noticing_ that I'm not very good at this, but noticing my inability to discern good ideas from bad ones doesn't translate out into having better discernment. I _have_ improved my discernment somewhat as I’ve learned and aged, but I’m still noticeably below average in this area.

For problems where I can just throw lots of low-cost ideas at the wall and see what sticks, this is fine, but where there’s a higher risk or cost associated with each attempt, it’s much less so. I have a lot of strengths, but discernment will probably never be one of them and it seems wise to admit that and leave the discernment to people who are better equipped to do it.

I'm not a very good Ender Wiggin, that just isn't where my strengths lie. But Ender couldn’t have won the Formic War on his own, Ender needed Bean, and Petra, and all the other members of his Jeesh. I might not be a very good Ender, but I could be a good Bean. I’m motivated, intelligent, value-aligned, and hardworking. With how many Enders there are in this community it seems like I should be able to find someone to work under.

A friend of mine questions whether this is actually describing a useful dynamic, or if my time would be better spent more time on personal improvement before trying to take actions that improve the world. I don't know if I agree with this and it seems like if I can make useful contributions now, it would be better for the world than if I waited.

So this question is really a few questions:

1) Is this a useful dynamic? If I can find someone to be the Samurai to their Daimyo, is that something which would be of benefit to the project of rationality?

2) If it is a useful dynamic, how might I go about finding someone to work under?

3) Am I, as a person, actually capable of making a positive difference in general or is my presence generally going to prove useless or detrimental? Is this something I can improve and if so, how?
# Scraping websites currently free due to coronavirus

Some sites are free due to the coronavirus and we should scrape them. Please list any temporarily-free websites you know of, such as [https://www.uptodate.com/](https://www.uptodate.com/)

To download sites I recommend [https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site](https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site)

Consider whether you want to use --no-offsite-links. Otherwise it will pull every linked page and its resources (and sometimes even embedded videos).
# Why don't we tape surgical masks to the face to seal them airtight?

As far as I understand the prime advantage of surgical masks over N95 masks lies in the N95 masks being able to seal and filter all of the air while the surgical masks allow air to pass at their sides.

Given that there are many situations where people would ideally wear N95 masks but have only access to surgical masks, why can't we improve the surgical masks by using adhesive tape to seal their borders to the face?
# One Hundred Billion Children’s Sky


This is the first post of my '[Death](https://hivewired.wordpress.com/the-death-series/)' series of essays. I wrote all the current essays in the Death series before I started posting on LW regularly, but I think it is probably one of the more important things I've created and thus I over the next week or so I'm going to be posting them here one by one. This post itself is essentially an introduction, but also serves as a set of infohazard warnings for the whole thing.
# Is this viable physics?

This [beautiful epic grandiose... thing](https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/?fbclid=IwAR1n4lMomBpqNPO8PzrHp_ktAs6JAq74W30NQyEkHzUfHqUpbBuiOhbf5Io) seems pretty impressive to me. It seems like someone took the lessons of Game of Life, and then used computers to explore those lessons, and sure enough they are well on their way to a Theory of Everything.

But I'm not a physicist so I don't know how novel (or even error-free) this is. Which is why I'm asking.

On the one hand, it seems several orders of magnitude too good to be true. It explains so many phenomena so elegantly that it makes me wonder if what's really going on is that Wolfram is staring at his computer too much and seeing patterns in the noise.

On the other hand, for years I've thought -- and I expect most of us have thought this too -- that when the final theory of physics is found it would be something like this. Some very simple rule that, when applied repeatedly zillions of times, generates the world around us. A fundamental ontology that consists of objects and relations, rather than different kinds of particles or waves or whatnot. Discrete, not continuous.
# Popular papers to be scrutinized?

Inspired by Alexey Guzey's [criticism](http://[https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/]) of Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep, as well as the SSC [criticisms](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/27/book-review-the-seven-principles-for-making-marriage-work/) of The Seven Principles of Marriage I was wondering if anyone had some good ideas for papers/ books that should be looked at more closely.

They should be popular/influential pieces of science, but either of questionable statistical rigor, or should be much more closely analyzed. My first thought is to go through the most cited papers in 'softer' fields (e.g. social psychology, nutrition), though I'm also curious about the literature that is not necessarily cited a lot, but often talked about by the public. Anyone have ideas?
# The one where Quirrell is an egg

Egg-based parody of HPMOR on r/HPMOR. I don't know why this exists. Spoilers, you have been warned.

How to describe it? It's some combination of the following two quotes.

> “The observational study is taller than a dozen men! It reaches journalists so quickly that it can melt common sense in midthought! One mention of confounders will bring it down.”

and

> “Professor, we’re surrounded by Dementors!” Harry gasped. “My buttered croissant disguise didn’t work! They’re going to capture us.”
> 
> Professor Quirrell smiled coldly. “Not if I use my egg powers.”

It's eggs-ellent.
# Probabilistic Blue-Eyed Islanders

A puzzle: what happens in the [blue-eyed islanders puzzle](https://xkcd.com/blue_eyes.html) if we allow a small probability p for each each person to make a mistake each night? Assume that the probability of a mistake is the same for each and is common knowledge, the islanders are all ideal Bayesian reasoners, and let's say that 80% is the confidence cutoff past which someone leaves.
# Integrating Hidden Variables Improves Approximation

Fun fact: the KL divergence of distribution  P\[X\] from distribution Q\[X\] [is convex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kullback%E2%80%93Leibler_divergence#Properties) in the pair P,Q. Writing it out: DKL(λP1\[X\]+(1−λ)P2\[X\]||λQ1\[X\]+(1−λ)Q2\[X\])≤λDKL(P1\[X\]||Q1\[X\])+(1−λ)DKL(P2\[X\]||Q2\[X\]) with 0≤λ≤1.

This is particularly interesting if we take P and Q to be two different models, and take the indices 1, 2 to be different values of another random variable Y with distribution P\[Y\] given by (λ,1−λ). In that case, the above inequality becomes:

DKL(P\[X\]||Q\[X\])≤EY\[DKL(P\[X|Y\]||Q\[X|Y\])\]

In English: the divergence between our models of the X-distribution _ignoring_ Y is at least as small as the average divergence between our models of the X-distribution _given_ Y. This is true regardless of what the two models are - _any_ approximation of the observable distribution improves (or gets no worse) when we integrate out a hidden variable, compared to fixing the value of the hidden variable.

Of course, this doesn't say anything about _how much_ the approximation improves. Presumably for bad approximations, the divergence will not converge to anywhere near zero as we integrate more and more hidden variables. And if the hidden variable doesn't actually interact with the observables significantly, then presumably the divergence decrease will be near-zero.

So when would we expect this to matter?

I'd expect it to matter mainly when the observable X consists of multiple variables which are "far apart" in a large model - i.e. there are many hidden variables mediating the interactions between observables. In other words, I'd expect this phenomenon to mainly be relevant to [information at a distance](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TTNS3tk5McHqrJCbR/abstraction-information-at-a-distance). It's a hint that information at a distance, in complex systems, converges to some sort of universal behavior/properties, which is [simpler in some sense](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ehnG4mseKF6xALmQy/p/zeGHRqNQc8FZR79a3) than the full fine-grained model.
# Two-player Catan

Here's a way to play Settlers of Catan with two players that [David](http://www.davidchudzicki.com/) and I worked out this weekend. We've only played one game with it so far, and didn't think very hard about tradeoffs, so there are probably better ways to do it.

*   Set up the board as normal.
    
*   Each player controls two colors. We did white/blue and red/orange.
    
*   Placement is A B B' A' A' B' B A
    
*   Turns aren't color specific, except that you can only build for one color on a turn.
    
*   If you own a port with either color you can fully use it on your turn.
    
*   Development cards are color specific, which really only matters for the 1 VP cards
    
*   Each player has one hand, and the robber limit is 14 instead of 7. Possibly this should be more like ten or even seven.
    
*   The game still ends when one color gets to 10 VP, but the goal is to not come in last. Whichever player has the color with the fewest VP at the end of the game loses. The player who got to 10 VP first wins ties.
    
*   Trading is allowed, I guess, though since the game is zero-sum you wouldn't actually trade with each other.
    
*   Hands are [open](https://www.jefftk.com/p/open-hand-catan), not to facilitate trading but to make the strategy more interesting by letting you better model your opponent.
    

We played two games, but stopped the first one very early on. We agreed that one of us had an 80% chance of winning and so counted it as 80% of a win. Like a [doubling cube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backgammon#Doubling_cube) this helps concentrate your time onto interesting games.

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/two-player-catan.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/two-player-catan-big.jpg)

I enjoyed playing, though I don't know how many more games of it I'd like to play. In generally I enjoy the dynamic of games with more people a lot more, though under the current circumstances that's not always practical. It has less waiting than regular Catan, which is a plus.

I think the 36-card variant ("gamblers fallacy dice") would help here a lot more than in regular Catan, since otherwise the game can get unbalanced quickly due to quirks of the die. In general I like the way the card variant adds strategy, especially if it's easy for the players to tell what cards are yet to come.

Because there's no trading, ports are a lot more important than in a regular game. David picked a port-heavy strategy while I went for variety, and (n=1) ports works better.

After playing I looked around for other sets of two-player rules and [there are](https://catan.fandom.com/wiki/2-player_variant) [a lot](https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/6104/how-do-you-make-settlers-of-catan-work-well-for-2-players-problems-and-play-te) [of variants](http://georgejaros.com/Files/Catan-for-2-Players.pdf) [out there](http://nick.borko.org/games/Catan2Players.pdf)! I haven't looked through them in detail to figure out whether I like this one best.
# How much motivation do you derive from curiosity alone in your work/research?

A [recent discussion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tTD8fbctGhH26Jahp/curiosity-a-greedy-feeling) of curiosity prompted me to start wondering about the importance of curiosity as a factor in research. Most people seem to agree that curiosity is a useful intrinsic motivator for research at the macro level. And discussions I've seen make a strong case for curiosity working better as a motivation for research at the macro-level than other potential motivators - status, prestige, etc. But, every time I read or think about this, I've felt this nagging unease that I only just managed to pinpoint the source of. My unease comes from my uncertainty about **how much curiosity can drive act as a single source of motivation to do day-to-day work in the absence of "discipline".**

Personally, as I mentioned in a comment on [this post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tTD8fbctGhH26Jahp/curiosity-a-greedy-feeling), I haven't found that curiosity on its provides sufficient motivation for me to continue making progress on work day after day. Even for work I'm genuinely interested in, there tend to be parts that are more and less interesting, so I still need to employ [daily scheduling](https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2015/09/29/deep-habits-three-recent-daily-plans/) to make continuous progress.

However, I'm a nobody, and famous thinkers like Richard Feynman talk about how they're motivated by the [pleasure of finding things out](https://learning.media.mit.edu/courses/mas713/readings/Finding_Things_Out.pdf) and getting [unstuck by playing](https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/kilcup.1/262/feynman.html). I love Feynman as much as the next person, but am wary of over-updating on his example or the public persona of any eminent thinker for that matter.

So instead, I'm curious to hear from people here: how much are you able to motivate yourself day-to-day via curiosity? Does this motivation substitute for scheduling / planning or complement it? Bonus points for discussing what your work tends to be and whether there are certain parts of it that you are more / less motivated to by curiosity.