trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
#unclogtheFDA: a twitter storm to approve vaccines
by Tim Liptrot — 2021-02-07T14:39:33.337Z

The slow FDA approval and regulation process has slowed down vaccination and caused countless deaths. The AstraZeneca vaccine, which is already being distributed in the UK and Europe has been delayed until April despite robust safety data. J&J finished its stage III and applied on Feb. 4th, but the advisory committee meeting was scheduled for the Feb. 26th. At the current rate, that is 66,000 deaths from now. The UK's advisory agency has shown that this analysis can be done in days, not weeks (see also). For a complete account of reforms needed to save lives, see here.

For the American people, the cost benefit calculation of vaccine approval is a no brainer. Faster approval will surely save tens of thousands of lives. For the bureaucrats at the FDA receive no upside from the lives saved, but a handful of adverse affects could damage their careers. These misaligned incentives cause the delay (combined with the FDA's anti-expected-value culture). But with enough political pressure any one of the FDA, the HHS, the White House or Congress could change this system. This post is about how to build that public pressure.

We need to bring in more Americans and control the issue framing. Many a wonky public health scholar has criticized these slow, reactionary policies: Marty Makary, Michael Mina, Peter Hotez and Vivek Murphy. Likewise for policy wonks: Alex Tabarrok, Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, Zvi Mowshowitz, Rob Wiblin. These authors made a stunning case for reform, but the conversation needs to move from wonks to the mainstream. A real public pressure campaign should be framed in terms appealing to the audience, should draw on personal stories of affected people (not EV calculations), and should create sharable viral content. When the White House sees public opinion shift they will have more leverage over the FDA for reform.

What is a Twitter storm?

When a specific tweet and hashtag are tweeted and retweeted quickly enough, the hashtag is included on Twitter's "trending" list and displayed to all Twitter users, even those who are not a member of the hashtag user's list of followers. This often leads to the original message or hashtag crossing to other social media sites or the mainstream media, resulting in much deeper penetration into the collective conscience (Techopedia).

In a coordinated action, a group of ~100 or more people tweet and retweet a hashtag at th...
Short, Extreme, Forgotten Torture vs Death
by burrito — 2021-02-07T09:31:07.683Z

Turns out Pascal's mugger is real, and as would be expected of someone who does Pascal's muggings, he's a jerk and likes forcing people to make impossible decisions. Also, his threats are discovered to be truthful and credible. He decides he's sick of mugging after collecting a few trillion dollars from it and wants to try something new. He takes out a gun (killing people with Matrix powers is for cowards) and forces you to make a choice.

Scenario 1: He puts the gun to your head. "I will kill you unless you let me put you through torture 3^^^3 [1] times more intense than anything you can possibly imagine. Don't worry though, it'll only last for a millisecond, and you won't remember it or suffer any trauma or anything."

Scenario 2: He puts the gun to a random stranger's head and tells you to make the choice for them. He freezes the stranger in place with his Matrix powers (2a: the stranger overhears before being frozen and decides on what they would choose, 2b: the stranger is frozen before they know what's happening) so the stranger has no way of communicating their preference to you. He will shoot if you don't make a choice.

Scenario 3: He puts the gun to a random stranger's head and tells them to make the choice. After you hear the stranger's choice (3a: they choose death, 3b: they choose torture), the mugger gives you the option to override it. He will abide by the stranger's choice if you don't make a choice.

What should you do?

In the words of the Torture vs Dust Specks question this was inspired by: I think the answer is obvious [in all scenarios]. How about you?

Footnote:

[1]: The notation is called Knuth's up-arrow notation. 3^3 is 3 times 3 times 3. 3^^3 is 3^(3^3). 3^^^3 is 3^^(3^^3). 3^^^3 is used as an arbitrarily large quantity so that there's no situation where it's "too small".
Democracy, Bureaucracy, Central Banking
by Martin Sustrik — 2021-02-07T08:54:12.717Z

Huge parts of our societies are managed in non-democratic, bureaucratic way. (I am using the term bureaucracy in the old Weberian sense. If you are living in XXI. century feel free to replace the word bureaucracy with technocracy - although, I guess, in technocracy the bureaucratic positions are filled by scientists and engineers rather than by landed gentry as was the case in Weber's Germany.)

People, of course, disagree on how to proceed. Should we continue the historical trend of societies becoming more democratic and make bureaucrats more accountable? Or should we continue the historical trend of governance becoming more efficient and get it rid of the soap opera of the partisan politics?

A nice little example of this dilemma is central banking.

I am not a historian, so I am not going to deal with the emergence and early times of central banks, however, my understanding is that the meandering between the political control and bureaucratic independence has always been there. (The banks emerged as private enterprises with state monopolies, then got nationalized etc.)

When entering the modern times, there was a strong political influence in most central banks.

This was causing problems. Think of it: Why not induce a short term boom before the elections to get voter support for the incumbent party and then compensate by deflating after the votes are counted? But that means that the central bank doesn't do what it is supposed to do, namely to react to the existing economic circumstances and keep the economy afloat. Rather it just follows the electoral cycle. What's worse, financial markets can take advantage of those predictable shifts in monetary policy and simply price them in.

To be more bland, here's a graph from 1993 paper by Alesina and Summers showing how inflation rate correlates with the independence of the central banks from the politics:

In 1990's there was a large shift towards central bank independence, that is, away from the democratic and towards the bureaucratic control.

Note that these were 1990's, the times of "end of history" and the heyday of the democracy after the fall of the Ostblok. Yet, apparently, central banking has just too important to be left to the democratic control.

If you like anecdotes better than theory, here you go: When President Erdogan of Turkey announced in 2018 that his first act after re-election will be to take control of in...
Massive consequences
by KatjaGrace — 2021-02-07T05:30:14.215Z

Hypothesis: whenever you make a choice, the consequences of it are almost as likely to be bad as good, because the scale of the intended consequences is radically smaller than the scale of the chaotic unintended effects. (The expected outcome is still as positive as you think, it’s just a small positive value plus a very high variance random value at each step.)

This seems different from how things are usually conceived, but does it change anything that we don’t already know about?

Could this be false?
Bring Back Free-Flow Valves
by jefftk — 2021-02-07T03:50:05.645Z

Over the past ~30y, manufacturers of small inflatables have switched
to non-reflow valves. They should switch back to free-flow ones.

Here's what I'm talking about:

See that little line on the valve, on the inside of the ball? In a
resting position it's closed. If you squeeze it or bite it, it opens.
You might see it called a "check valve",
"bite valve", or "non-return valve". The goal is to make it easier to
blow up, because when you're taking a breath the air mostly doesn't
leak out.

The alternative is a free-flow valve, where the air goes in easily,
and comes out just as easily. These require a small amount of
technique: when you take a breath, you need to push your tongue gently
against the opening, to keep the air from escaping.

I will admit, if you haven't learned this technique, the new way is
easier. But even if you have the valve fully opened, it provides far
more resistance to your breath than a free-flow.

Luckily, in many cases it is possible to remove the flap, converting
it to flow freely. If you reach in with a pair of needle nose pliers,
you may be able to grab the flap, twist it, and rip it free. I
haven't ruined a valve doing this yet, though it is a risk, and I
wouldn't do it on anything especially expensive.

For larger inflatables it's worth using a pump, but in my experience,
for a given amount of effort I can blow up something up about four
times bigger with a free-flow valve.

Comment via: facebook
O2 Curve Review: Well Worth the Money
by  — 2021-02-06T22:35:50.940Z

[Cross-posted from Grand, Unified, Empty. This is not an incentivized review; nobody at O2 even knows I’m writing this and none of the links have referral tracking. This is not medical advice, I am not a doctor, etc.]

Like many of you, I’ve been wearing a reusable cloth mask for just under a year now to protect myself, and others, from COVID-19. Cloth masks work well, and remain far better than nothing if they’re what you have available. However, with several more-infectious COVID variants now circulating and no end in sight due to vaccine delays, I decided I could probably be doing better. Enter the O2 Curve.

I had originally intended to purchase an N95-certified mask, but I quickly found that Amazon search results for “N95 mask” are effectively useless – too many fraudsters have realized that adding the word “N95” to things which are clearly not certified (and sometimes aren’t even masks) is a great way to get more hits. After poking around the internet, I stumbled upon the website of O2 Canada which promised an effective (though technically not N95-certified – more on that later) respirator mask, backed by publicly available filtration and testing data. I decided to give it a shot.

I’ve now worn my O2 Curve several times, including for a nearly one hour trip to my local grocery store, and the verdict is in. I love it, and I’m not going back to cloth.

Masks and Respirators and N95, Oh My

The first thing to mention, since it bears clarification, is the difference between a regular face mask and a respirator, and what N95 certification means in all of this. A face mask (cloth, surgical-grade, or other material) is just something that sits in front of your nose and mouth, usually held in place by looping around your ears. Face masks are effective at filtering the air which passes through them, but they do not form any kind of seal. This means that air (and virus particles) can escape or enter around the edges of the mask. Due to the lack of seal, and the way air flows when you breathe, wearing a mask does a great job of protecting other people from your air but is somewhat less effective at protecting you from other people (unless those other people are also wearing masks, of course). As I mentioned before, masks are far better than nothing; even cloth masks cut COVID infection rates by half or more when worn properly, and surgical-grade masks do significantly bet...
What it means to be lucky
by Amir Bolous — 2021-02-06T17:40:43.761Z

This is a linkpost for https://amirbolous.com/posts/luck

Introduction

Anecdotes

Dimension One: Random Good Fortune

Dimension Two: Luck as a Function

Dimension Three: Luck as a Serendipity Vehicle

Closing Thoughts

"When it comes to luck you make your own" - Bruce Springteen

"Luck is when preparation meets opportunity" - Seneca

"I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work the more I have of it" - Thomas Jefferson

Introduction

I've noticed that no one seems to agree on a concrete definition for what we term "luck." Colloquially, luck has been adopted to mean many different things in many different contexts. I would like to arrive at some concrete understanding of what it is and to do so, let's look at how it's used in some different contexts

Anecdotes

1. The Epic Goal

Jimmy is a terrible soccer player. During tryouts, Jimmy (by some stroke of success) scores one of the most amazing goals the coach has ever seen. Jimmy makes the team. Later, his friends ask - "how did you score such an epic goal?" Jimmy replies with "I have no idea, I must have gotten lucky!"

2. Déjà Vu

Alice is preparing for a technical interview at a big tech company. She has two weeks before her final round and she commits to studying really hard - she follows a strict study schedule for 8 hours a day, focusing on improving her problem solving abilities. Come interview day, she's nervous but she feels ready. After the brief introductions, she's given her first problem - given a Linked List, reverse it. "Aha!" she thinks, "I've seen this problem I know how to do it!" She codes up a perfect solution. At the same time, her other friend Matt is also interviewing, and he's given a different problem which he messes up. Alice gets the job, Matt doesn't. Alice decides that she must have "gotten lucky"

3. The Cold Email

Grace is a researcher and an avid blogger who loves to write about physics. Over the past year, she's garnered a bit of a following and people regularly stumble across her blog when trying to understand different Physics concepts. One day, she gets an email titled "Possible Opportunity for Physics Research" - it's from a Professor at her dream lab who wants to meet for a possible collaboration! One week and meeting later, she's secured an awesome collaboration working on her dream project, Grace thinks "Wow, what are the odds that someone from [dream lab] comes across my work...
How could natural language look like if it hadn't evolved from speech?
by newroscientist — 2021-02-06T16:31:20.921Z

Written language is a linear progression of symbols - in other words, a function from some "time" to a finite alphabet. This fact is a direct result of prehistoric humans primarily communicating by fluctuating air pressure, which one can model as a real-valued function of time.

So suppose it wasn't that way - i.e. imagine aliens communicating by displaying pictures on their chests or projecting holograms. How might their "language" look like?

I imagine two things (and ask for more ideas in the comments):

In a 2D (or 3D) structure, it will be much easier to refer to previously introduced concepts by arranging them closer to each other - the language would look more like a directed acyclic graph than a linear progression of symbols.
It is easier to refer to quantities visually (human languages typically have lots of imprecise words for quantities).

Math already uses multidimensional "languages" in some places - e.g. categorical diagrams or tensor networks. Of course, engineers and architects often display their thoughts graphically as well. But as of now, all of these systems are special-purpose. So how might a general artificial language unconstrained by being defined as a one-dimensional function look like?

I think AI/ML systems might have a much easier time processing such a language (which might be an internal representation of knowledge) because coreference resolution can become much easier or trivial. To elaborate:

For many years, AI researchers have devoted much attention to processing and generating natural language - partly because that's how an AI can be useful to humans, partly in the hope that a sufficiently advanced language model itself becomes indistinguishable from intelligence.

A basic problem in natural language processing is known as coreference resolution: Understanding which expressions in a text refer to the same concepts, and having the NLP system pay "attention" to them at the right times. This task is nontrivial in natural languages because here, a word has only two direct neighbours - and if one wants to connect more than two concepts semantically, one needs nontrivial grammar rules that have mostly stumped AIs until about a few years ago, and that AIs still get wrong much of the time (consider e. g. Winograd Schemas).

Starting with the original attention mechanisms in NLP (see e.g. here), AI researchers have developed a plethora of tricks to ...
Fake Frameworks for Zen Meditation (Summary of Sekida's Zen Training)
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2021-02-06T15:38:17.957Z

Meditation, and Zen meditation in particular, is hard to teach in the sense that most people cannot learn to do it as intended by simply reading or hearing about it. Instead they need to attempt it, talk about what happened with someone more experienced, get feedback, and try again. I think this is because most models of how to meditate are implicit and complex, so written meditation instructions tend to leave out important subtle details.

Probably the most successful attempt to counter this dynamic and get all the necessary instructions in writing is The Mind Illuminated, which offers a book's worth of words and diagrams to teach you how to perform a particular style of Theravada concentration meditation. Aside from a lot of specific advice and answers to questions, it usefully contains a lot of explicit models built using fake frameworks to give the reader gears for understanding meditation.

Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy by Katsuki Sekida does something similar, but for Zen.

In this post I'll share some of Sekida's models that I think are especially useful to have if you're interested in Zen, Buddhism, or meditation more generally. I have to cover a couple sections of preliminaries to set those models up, though, so things don't really get going until the section on breathing.

Caveat lector:

Sekida's models as presented in the book have some limitations. In particular, I think he often gets the low-level details wrong when he tries to ground his models in science because much of his information was outdated even at the time of writing (1960s). Thankfully this ends up not being too much of an issue because the models don't actually rely on those details, which is to say Sekida is sometimes overzealous in trying to ground his models in scientific details that are not actually gears within his models.

Thus what follows is my take on his models. It's fairly faithful, but I've taken editorial license in places to either increase concision (this is a post rather than a book) or to cut out what I consider to be superfluous details. I've also added some commentary reflecting my understanding of how Sekida's models might connect with other ways of thinking about Zen practice.

Apologies if I end up misrepresenting Sekida.

Zen meditation

The primary meditative practice in Zen is called "zazen" which just means "seated meditation". Although Sekida touches on some other ...
Current cryonics impressions
by KatjaGrace — 2021-02-06T10:00:18.252Z

People around me often sign up for cryonics, and say that it is very important. My guess is that this argument for it, heavily inspired by Waitbutwhy’s much longer piece, as well as years of talking to people around me and reading their blogs, is correct:

1. One day people will probably live much longer than they do now.

Probably we will work out how to beat the diseases of aging, as we have many of the infectious diseases. Eventually dying at age 90 of heart disease will seem as much of a needless tragedy as dying of an infection at age 45 does to us now.

2. One day we will probably be able to ‘freeze’ and usefully thaw organs like brains using vitrification.

We can already do this with other organs. For instance a rabbit kidney can apparently already be vitrified then warmed up and put back in a rabbit and work.

3. People can start to successfully evade the diseases of aging as soon as science reaches the freezing part of 2, even if it hasn’t got to the thawing part or to 1 yet.

Because once you are vitrified, you can wait quite a long time for further developments.

There is a decent chance that we are already at the freezing part of 2. For instance, a defrosted vitrified rabbit brain apparently appeared to be in good order, though I assume we don’t know how to reattach brains to rabbits, alas.

The chance that we are there on the freezing is high enough that people dying soon (by our current standards of irrevivability) should generally be vitrified instead of burned or buried, if the chance to survive longer is worth the price to them.

You can sign up for something like this at the cost of a not-super-expensive life insurance policy, though I think the more promising techniques at the moment aren’t available yet to purchase.

I haven’t actually signed up for this, but I might, and if I thought there was a higher chance of me dying sooner, I would get around to figuring it out more urgently. So I thought I’d point it out to others older than me, who might want to think about it more promptly.

I found Waitbutwhy’s essay on these topics pretty good.
Is the world becoming better?
by invertedpassion — 2021-02-06T09:28:31.063Z

This is a linkpost from https://invertedpassion.com/is-the-world-becoming-better/

This essay is inspired by the book Factfulness where the key idea explored is that the world has witnessed significant progress over the last few decades, but most people are unaware of that fact because they hold distorted views.

Talking of distorted views, to get a sense of how much do you know about the world, I highly recommend taking this quiz. Hans Rosling, the author of the book, had been quizzing thousands of people across the world and most of them (including Nobel laureates) performed worse than random chance on such questions.

For example, most people overestimate the percentage of the human population living in extreme poverty (which is defined as having an income of less than $2/mo). It’s 10% (as of 2017) but even the most educated people get it wrong.

People don’t just get the latest facts wrong but they get the trend wrong as well. Many indicators such as extreme poverty, child mortality rate, babies per family have been rapidly improving across the world.

Via Gapminder

How does this knowledge matter?

Well, it matters because your decisions based on wrong facts are likely to be wrong. The knowledge that extreme poverty has not been rising but rather is rapidly falling across the world gives you an entirely different emotional and rational framework to live your life by.

One of the phrases I loved from the book is that things can be bad and better. Bad in the sense that even 10% extreme poverty is nothing to celebrate about, but better in the sense that just a few decades ago, this figure was 50%.

In other words, you can hold both these thoughts simultaneously in your head: a) billions of people have escaped extreme poverty in recent times; b) hundreds of millions of people are still living in extreme poverty.

Remember: things can be bad and better.

Why do we hold distorted views?

Believing wrong facts is mostly due to our cognitive biases, which are hard-wired into us by evolution. For example, we tend to pay a lot of attention to negative news. The ruffling in the bushes is likely just wind, but it pays to assume that it’s a tiger because in rare chance it is, your wrong belief will save your life.

This is why news also is overwhelmingly negative and attention-grabbing. No journalist would report the slow, steady but usually invisible progress such as the reduction in extrem...