trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The dangers of digital vaccines
by canaveroe — 2021-02-11T18:39:18.213Z

This is my first post on LW so I hope I get it right, please let me know if I don't!
I've been a Geneticist for 15 years (academia and industry) and while there are several issues I feel people aren't addressing with regards to Covid-19, the one that has me most concerned is the digital nature of these new vaccines, over the traditional analog method of letting your body figure out which antibodies it is going to develop on its own. So why is this an issue?
With RNA/DNA vaccines, you are essentially programing a person to have a very specific immunological state. An immunity that is perfectly identical/reproducable between individuals vaccinated against the same sequence, resulting in a real homogenous kind of protection across the population. Vaccines have traditionally left the act of designing the actual antibodies up to your immune system itself, with weakened/attenuated/fragmented versions of the disease presented but importantly no directions on what to do with it. Like any rigged fight, the outcome is known in advance, but the specifics of the fight very much depends on the specifics of the night, and of course dumb luck. As a result we develop different sets of different polyclonal antibodies from one person to the next using the traditional vaccination method.
It means something significant that one can essentially put people into immunological cohorts with identical reactions to a known substance/sequence. Particularly when we all must trust that what goes into your arm in the doctor's office is really what it says on the tin. If the RNA/DNA vaccination method is as generic, safe, reliable and interchangeable as everyone hopes, that dramatically increases the ability to give people slightly different coded immunological states without them ever knowing. Barcoding through vaccination, essentially.
What does it mean that we can now tag taxi drivers from Essex who make less than $50,000 a year with one vaccine, and nurses from London over the age of 40 with another, without either knowing that they've been tagged or without any understanding that this may mean their immune system can be targeted selectively in the future?
If this tagging hypothesis is correct, we can make a few predictions for what we are likely see over the next few months:

1) A hardline position taken on DIY vaccines, or vaccines from foreign governments, because they introduce noise into...
Covid 2/11: As Expected
by Zvi — 2021-02-11T18:30:01.438Z

Nothing both unexpected and important happened this week, other than that we might be on the verge of at least partially solving obesity.

There’s plenty else to talk about, but everything was on trend. That doesn’t mean my predictions were perfect or the speed of trends didn’t give us a few surprises, nor does it mean I could have written this post a week ago. It does mean that long term expectations haven’t much changed.

Vaccine efforts continue to be far too slow to improve, but to still improve slowly, including both distribution and approval. All current numbers continue to steadily decline, as they should until the new strains threaten to reverse that, which should still be a few weeks away.

While we can hope for unexpected good news, the more realistic and modest hope is that the lack of major news continues but things continue to steadily improve, and vaccine access improves dramatically in March after the approval of Johnson & Johnson combined with accelerating production across the board.

The Covid Tracking Project will be ending soon, and I still don’t have an great alternative source I love, so if you do have one (either for downloading data, for grabbing good data manually slash copy/pasting into a spreadsheet, or both) please suggest it in the comments.

In the meantime, let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Last week: 7.7% positive rate on 12.7 million tests, and an average of 3,041 deaths per day.

Prediction for this week: 6.9% positive rate and an average of 2,750 deaths. Current trends should continue, with minimal impact yet from new strains, changed policies or increased vaccinations.

Results: 6.4% positive rate and an average of 2,968 deaths.

The 6.4% number isn’t shocking and was definitely in my range of plausible outcomes, but it’s pretty great. It’s even better than it looks, because our test counts are in rapid decline as well, from 12.2 million to 11.3 million, which presumably reflects lower demand. Things are improving rapidly, if not rapidly enough to stall the rise of the English strain, but things could plausibly be 25% better week-over-week, and that’s going to buy us time to improve further. This is reason to be hopeful.

The 2,968 deaths are highly disappointing, as that’s only a few percent less than last week. The 14-day-delayed-from-diagnosis-to-deaths rolling 7-day CFR went up from 1.29% to 1.57%, ...
Has attempt been made to identify all mechanisms which allowed human species to come this in terms of value alignment?
by Thomas Brown — 2021-02-11T18:16:08.690Z

My question is close to the point of view of Great Filter argument. I am looking for the list of structural and behavioral features that allowed development of complexity all the way to the current state.
The other perspective on this - what mechanism we have that serve the role of value alignment in humanity?
Speedrunning my Morning Makes the Coffee Taste Weird 
by kithpendragon — 2021-02-11T17:06:46.287Z

For the first time in I can't remember how long, I failed to set a wakeup alarm on a workday. I've been covering an emergency vacation for a co-worker, and just forgot to set the alarm on a day I don't normally work. Fortunately, I also have a backup plan: I have another alarm set to go off every day half an hour after my wake-up-for-work time. This reminds me when it's time to actually leave the house on workdays, and prevents social jetlag from accumulating on days I don't work. This alarm went off as planned, and I was left to speedrun my morning.

Speedrunning is a way some people like to play video games. At its simplest, to play a speedrun all you have to do is time yourself as you play the game from start to finish, and try to get faster on each iteration. If you're feeling competitive, you can race against others by making video of the run as proof and submitting it to a leaderboard. Each game has its own community that may establish many different rulesets (or categories) that runners must follow for a run to be recognized as competitively valid.

Ultimately, the speedrun incentivizes a style of play that sacrifices all other non-required metrics for the fastest time. It's an optimization problem that can sometimes get extremely complex.

My ruleset became: Get to work alive. On time strongly preferred. Must be appropriately dressed. No damage boosting or clipping allowed.

So, I first went to the kitchen and turned on the kettle for coffee. Normally, I do this after I get dressed, but this way I could do both at once. Time saved: 5 minutes.

Returning to my bedroom, I dressed quickly and woke up my partner. She agreed to put my hair in a quick braid - she does the job faster and with higher quality than I do. Normally I bind the hair with a series of pony elastics to prevent tangling, then tie it up in a knot so I don't have the elastics digging into my back as I sit at work. Time saved: 7 minutes.

Back in the kitchen, I skipped my usual coffee ritual in favor of a simple pour-over directly into a travel mug. Time saved: 11 minutes.

Then, out the door for the commute. I arrived at work 7 minutes after my normal time, and 7 minutes before the official start of my shift. Nobody even noticed. Total time saved: 23 minutes.

But speedrunning is about sacrificing on other measures to optimize on time, so what did I give up?

Physically, I had flooded my body with stress...
In balance and flux
by KatjaGrace — 2021-02-11T15:40:12.699Z

Someone more familiar with ecology recently noted to me that it used to be a popular view that nature was ‘in balance’ and had some equilibrium state, that it should be returned to. Whereas the new understanding is that there was never an equilibrium state. Natural systems are always changing. Another friend who works in natural management also recently told me that their role in the past might have been trying to restore things to their ‘natural state’, but now the goal was to prepare yourself for what your ecology was becoming. A brief Googling returns this National Geographic article by Tik Root, The ‘balance of nature’ is an enduring concept. But it’s wrong. along the same lines. In fairness, they seem to be arguing against both the idea that nature is in a balance so intense that you can easily disrupt it, and the idea that nature is in a balance so sturdy that it will correct anything you do to it, which sounds plausible. But they don’t say that ecosystems are probably in some kind of intermediately sturdy balance, in many dimensions at least. They say that nature is ‘in flux’ and that the notion of balance is a misconception.

It seems to me though that there is very often equilibrium in some dimensions, even in a system that is in motion in other dimensions, and that that balance can be very important to maintain.

Some examples:

bicycle

society with citizens with a variety of demeanors, undergoing broad social change

human growing older, moving to Germany, and getting pregnant, while maintaining a narrow range of temperatures and blood concentrations of different chemicals

So the observation that a system is in flux seems fairly irrelevant to whether it is in equilibrium.

Any system designed to go somewhere relies on some of its parameters remaining within narrow windows. Nature isn’t designed to go somewhere, so the issue of what ‘should’ happen with it is non-obvious. But the fact that ecosystems always gradually change along some dimensions (e.g. grassland becoming forest) doesn’t seem to imply that there are not still balance in other dimensions, where they don’t change so much, and where changing is more liable to lead to very different and arguably less good states.

For instance, as a grassland gradually reforests, it might continue to have a large number of plant eating bugs, and bug-eating birds, such that the plant eating bugs would dest...
Unwitting cult leaders
by Kaj_Sotala — 2021-02-11T11:10:04.504Z

An insight that I’d kind of already had, but which this interview with Michael Taft (relevant section starts at about 32 minutes) helped crystallize:

We tend to think of a “cult leader” as someone who intentionally sets out to create a cult. But most cult-like things probably don’t form like that. A lot of people feel a strong innate desire to be in a cult.

In the podcast, Taft suggests that it’s rooted in an infant’s need to attach to a caregiver, and to treat them as a fully dependable authority to fix all problems – a desire which doesn’t necessarily ever go fully away. Once someone becomes a teacher of some sort, even if they had absolutely no desire to create a cult, they will regardless attract people who want to be their cultists.

There are people who want to find a fully dependable authority figure to look up to, and are just looking for someone who feels like a good fit for the role. (I should note that I have definitely not been immune to feeling this yearning myself.) To avoid having cultists, “not intending to create a cult” isn’t enough; you have to actively fight against people’s tendency to idealize you, by doing things that force them to confront the fact that you are actually just a human.

I’m reminded of something I recall Eliezer Yudkowsky once saying: “if you tell your doting followers not to form a cult, they will go around saying ‘We Must Not Form A Cult, Great Leader Mundo Said So’.”

Once people do start pulling you towards a cult leader role, it’s going to feel very appealing. What it feels like from the inside is “all of these people like me and say that I’ve done a lot of good for them, so clearly I must be doing things right, and since they also listen to me, I can use my position to help them out even more”.

It’s not just that the cultists are getting “brainwashed” by their leader; it’s also that the leader is getting brainwashed by their cultists to take the role that they want the leader to take. Cults are said to use “love bombing” to attract new recruits, but in at least some cases, it probably also happens that the cult leader is getting love bombed by their followers.

And the temptation to take on that role is powerful not only because it feels nice personally, but also because it does allow you to use your power for good. One definition for a hypnotic trance that I’ve heard is that it’s a state in which a person’s critical faculty...
[AN #137]: Quantifying the benefits of pretraining on downstream task performance
by Rohin Shah — 2021-02-10T18:10:02.561Z

Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here. In particular, you can look through this spreadsheet of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter.

Audio version here (may not be up yet).

Please note that while I work at DeepMind, this newsletter represents my personal views and not those of my employer.

HIGHLIGHTS

Scaling Laws for Transfer (Danny Hernandez et al) (summarized by Asya): This paper studies empirical scaling laws for transfer learning in language models. The authors use Transformer-based models to predict Python code by training on three different dataset curricula:

- Training from-scratch on Python code

- Pre-training on natural language, then fine-tuning on Python code

- Pre-training on natural language and non-Python code, then fine-tuning on Python code

The authors then measure the "effective data transferred" from pre-training-- if we wanted to replace all the pre-training steps with from-scratch training, maintaining the same loss, how much additional from-scratch data would we need?

They find that when the amount of data used to train is small, effective data transferred is described by a simple power-law function of D_F, the amount of data used for fine-tuning, and N, the number of parameters: k (D_F)^α (N)^β, for constants k, α, and β.

In their experiments, β doesn't change between pre-training on natural language and pre-training on a mixture of natural language and non-Python code. They hypothesize that β measures how the model architecture generalizes on the target distribution, and doesn't depend on the contents of the pre-training data.

The authors think that α is a measure of the directed proximity of the pre-training and from-scratch distributions, with smaller α indicating closer proximity. Measuring α can be done cheaply by changing the finetuning dataset size while holding the pretrained model constant, making it useful for deciding between collecting more fine-tuning data and increasing model size. For pre-training on natural language and fine-tuning on Python, β is about 2 * α, so for decreasing loss, increasing the fine-tuning dataset size by a factor of C (e.g., 100x) would be worth approximately the sam...
We got what's needed for COVID-19 vaccination completely wrong
by ChristianKl — 2021-02-10T07:59:46.331Z

I would summarize the leading thought in 2020 on vaccination on LessWrong and the review that's now popular in the mainstream as:

New vaccination technology like mRNA-based vaccines and adenovirus-based vaccines allow faster development of vaccines. We still have the challenge of building enough vaccine factories. To build enough vaccine factories.

This seems to be wrong and the better view is:

Peptide-based vaccines are well understood and unsexy. We have existing adjuvants with well understood safety profile. They can be easily produced with equipment we already have. Given that they are unsexy nobody wants to run a clinical trial right and Western governments are interested in suing people for developing such technology then they are interested in vaccine development.

According to it's Moderna's information, the first patient who got the Moderna vaccine got it on the March 16. Two weeks later Euroimmun founder and biotech billionaire Winfried Stöcker gave himself the first dose of a vaccine he developed himself. In contrast to Moderna he however was not focused on bringing a vaccine to market. He just wanted don't wanted to get COVID-19 and vaccinated himself. His company rather focused on developing antibody tests that were in short supply at the time.

Given past studies of the Coronavirus it was common knowledge that targeting the spike protein of COVID-19 was a good idea for developing a vaccine. Moderna announced that they designed a vaccine in one day by simply targeting the spike protein. Stöcker decided to also go for a domain of the spike protein and mixed it with an already well-understood adjuvant. Given that a lot of the risks from a vaccine come from bad adjuvants and he thought that being in his 70ths getting COVID-19 was undesirable the risk calculation clearly came out in favor of vaccinating himself with his mix. After everything went well with himself and he developed antibodies as predicted he blogged about it and gave it to his family as he didn't want them to get COVID-19 either.

It's hard to get the timeline right here but Preston Estep, Don Wang, Alex Hoekstra, Ranjan Ahuja and George Church et al had a similar idea. They also didn't want to get COVID-19 and knew plenty about biology. In contrast to Stöcker they cared a bit more about not being boring and thought about what they wanted out of a vaccine and coordinated with their friends in...
A great hard day
by KatjaGrace — 2021-02-10T07:00:12.892Z

(Draft from a while ago, lightly edited.)

There were times when I was younger that I used to fantasize about having a friend at all, let alone a boyfriend. And there were times when I thought that if I could just figure out how to make life consistently bearable, I’d really be onto something. So when I say how great my life is, it means that hard lives can get a lot better, not that mine is likely to be consistently more awesome than yours (I hope).

Today was great. I arrived in the world caught in a bundle of sheets with my boyfriend. Half asleep, I decided to wake him up by incrementally escalated cuddling, which I assume is similar in its benefits to those slowly loudening alarms.

At work I came across a thing that was that most unpleasant combination, of implicitly disrespectful and genuine evidence that I might be bad. Which I dealt with largely with calm, curiosity, and good intent. I thought about it and wrote down considerations. Then I asked a couple of other people about that and about another customarily shameful and distressing question, for good measure. I felt something good in my mind growing in strength, and exercising it made other things blossom: what had been an uncomfortable reserve into a fruitful friendliness.

I had gone to bed last night with a headache, and fallen asleep thinking that on the outside view headaches often disappear by sleeping, but that my intuition said that this one would get worse. By the time I finished making lunch today, it was so bad that I quickly degenerated into an unhappy heap. It was that kind of headache where you feel hot and fragile and your neck aches and you wonder if you have meningitis but you don’t have the strength to get into that kind of inquiry. I lay in my reclining chair and thought that it would be wise to take painkillers, but that would involve doing things.

My boyfriend came and looked after me. He put all the things around me - tea and sugar in a bowl and apple sauce and little packets of MeWe peanut butter and painkillers. He got another table for it all, and rubbed my neck, and looked in my eyes, and talked to me about what I care about in the world. I nibbled at the sugar and sipped the tea. I played Sporcle and learned about historic dates and American presidents, and I didn’t feel like I should be doing something else.

I took some xanax, in case my headache was being worsened by my unea...
Notes on Schelling's "Strategy of Conflict" (1960)
by MichaelA — 2021-02-10T02:48:25.847Z

I'm crossposting this from the EA Forum, due to Habryka sort-of suggesting doing so.

The Strategy of Conflict, published in 1960 by

Thomas Schelling

, is:

A series of closely interrelated essays on game theory, [which] deals with an area in which progress has been least satisfactory - the situations where there is a common interest as well as conflict between adversaries: negotiations, war and threats of war, criminal deterrence, extortion, tacit bargaining. It proposes enlightening similarities between, for instance, maneuvering in limited war and in a traffic jam; deterring the Russians and one's own children; the modern strategy of terror and the ancient institution of hostages. (

source

)

Here’s

a free PDF of the book, and

here’s

the Audible link.[1]

In this post, I’ll:

Share some overall thoughts on the book
Share the Anki cards I made for myself when reading the book[2]

I intend this as a lower-effort alternative to writing notes specifically for public consumption or writing a proper book review
If you want to download the cards themselves (along with other nuclear-war-related cards) to import them into your own deck, follow this link.

List some other resources that people could consider reading/watching if they want to learn about game theory and (nuclear) war

My hope is that this post will draw some effective altruists' (EAs') and rationalists' attention to this interesting book, help them decide whether reading it is worth their time, and help them quickly gain some key insights from the book. (See also Should pretty much all content that's EA-relevant and/or created by EAs be (link)posted to the Forum?)

Overall thoughts on the book

I read The Strategy of Conflict because someone told me they think this is a good book to read if one wishes to understand how international tensions might escalate to nuclear war, how many weapons might be used in a nuclear war, and whether

countervalue

targeting would occur. The book’s concepts, framings, insights, and examples indeed seemed useful for that purpose, as well as for a surprisingly wide range of other issues.

This was despite me already knowing some game theory - maybe around as much as one learns in a typical undergraduate economics degree? That said, I expect someone who already knows much more game theory than I did would get somewhat less out of the book.

I’ve ranked this as roughly the 9th (out of 44)

mo

...