trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Russian x-risks newsletter spring 21
by avturchin — 2021-06-01T12:10:32.694Z

Despite vaccination with Russian Sputnik, I’ve got covid. It was relatively mild, but with elevated levels of D-dimer, which means higher risk of thrombosis. I am fine now.

Notwithstanding availability of vaccines, only 10 per cent of Russian population has vaccinated and the reasons is strong disbelieve in what government say. Some people wait more classical Chumakov vaccine which is built around inactivated viruses of covid, not mRNA or vectors, but its production is limited.

Lockdowns measures are also almost absent in Russia and life looks normal. In May, the covid incidence started to grow again in Moscow, may be fuelled by new strains.

Meanwhile, Russia accumulated largest in decades army on the west border with Ukraine in spring, and even delivery agricultural machinery was delayed because of urgent demand for railroad tracks from military. The was speculation about possible annexing of the part of Ukraine, but nothing has happened. Ukraine now got access to very effective Turkish drones and it may use them to reclaim lost land in Donbas, so Russian deployment may be a countermeasure.

Reforestation of Siberia may be not a solution for global warming, as trees have lower albedo than grass. To support grasslands in Siberia we need… mammoth, according to the director of Pleistocene park.

Russian scientists expect that the next pandemic will be from bird flu H5N8, which is slowly adapting to humans in last 10 years.

Also, the systems of dams on major Russian rivers is old and were built in Soviet time. A collapse of any such system would be very large local catastrophe; meanwhile strong floods are expected in Enisey river in June Such catastrophe may shift public perception of hydroenergy in the world which is currently regarded as safe and renewable source.

Russian “success” in hypersonic missiles prompted Pentagon to develop its own even quicker missiles; such missiles give less time for a counterstrike decision and increase the chances of accidental nuclear war.

The most plausible explanation of the recent UFO reports near US fleet is Russian or Chinese drones which pretend to look like alien spacecraft and spoof radars with fake images about speed and positions, thus prompting them to turn on war mode and provide valuable information, according to Drive. However, Russian drones’ development are lagging even from Turkish, so “UFOs” are ...
Which animals can suffer?
by Valentin2026 — 2021-06-01T03:42:43.331Z

In this recent paper, the author study whether the octopi can suffer. Well, how are you going to answer that? Ask him?

It turns out there are two ways you can decide whether the animal can suffer or cannot. The first is simple. You just define that vertebrates can suffer (therefore experiments with them should follow ethical regulations) and that all other animals can not. Simple, but kind of arbitrary. And yes, obviously octopi can't suffer then by definition.

Another approach is functional. If an animal can learn to avoid pain (not just avoid it right now, but memorize what happened at given conditions and avoid these conditions), then the animal can suffer. According to this definition and experiments conducted in the abovementioned paper, octopi can suffer - so should be treated as vertebrates.

The second definition looks more logical to me. However, there is one problem with this one as well. If we make it purely functional, we should agree that an artificial neural network under the procedure of reinforcement learning suffers. Or instead of introducing an arbitrary threshold of "vertebrate - invertebrate", we introduce not less arbitrary threshold "biological neurons - artificial neurons".

Does it mean we should worry about the suffering of our models? And this is not the whole story. From the mathematical point of view, many things can be mapped onto the learning process. Does it all involve suffering?

So far, I see the following possible answers. Maybe there are more, that I am unaware of.

Indeed all abovementioned suffers.
There is a magical biological threshold.
The ability to suffer is determined in an anthropocentric way. I think that a cat suffers because I see it and I feel really sorry, I can relate to it. For octopus, I kind of can relate too, but less than to a cat. For code running on my laptop, I can't relate at all. An interesting corollary would be that a teddy bear suffers.
Strength, not courage, is the second component of goodness
by Srdjan Miletic — 2021-06-01T03:32:07.488Z

I've long thought that there are three parts to being a good person

Wisdom: Knowing what the right thing to do is

Courage: Having the bravery required to do it

Choice: Choosing to do it

All three deserve their own articles but for now let's look at courage. My initial reasoning for courage was simple. Knowing is the right thing to do doesn't mean anything if you're too much of a coward to do it. When I was younger I would always imagine extreme scenarios when thinking about this virtue. Would I give up my life if asked to pledge to a false faith. Would I really choose death over giving up 5 innocent people to the secret police. As I've got older and stepped into the real world more and more, my experience has been that most people are essentially cowards and won't even pay the most minor costs to do the right thing. Experiences I've had include:

A debating coach preferentially giving tournament spots to people she liked. Very few people in the club being willing to speak out, despite knowing this was happening and agreeing it was wrong, because doing so might loose them spots.

A consultancy lies on it's timesheets, overcharging clients. None of the highly-paid, ultra-employable engineers besides myself are willing to go on the record and say to superiors that this behavior is immoral and literally illegal

A company made up of woke, socially conscious millennial being fine with defrauding the NHS by selling 1 min text chat's between a counselor and child/teen as equivalent to full 40 min counseling sessions

Still, the problem with courage is that it describes only resistance to forces from the outside world. To be good, it's not enough merely to be able to resist external pressure or social coercion. You also have to be able to master your own daemons. Whether it's the urge to cheat on your partner, greed for the last cookie or biases against other peoples due to your upbringing, many character defects, irrationalities and compulsions can lead you to immoral behavior. Resisting these internal daemons is just as much a part of being a good person as resisting external daemons.

What word captures the ability to do what is right irrespective of both external and internal pressure? I think strength is that word. A person who is strong will do what is right even when doing so is hard. A person who is weak will cave, whether it's to threats or to their own impul...
Which activities do you prefer to better recover productivity?
by Valentin2026 — 2021-06-01T01:01:42.384Z

I would like to ask you to share in the comments what do you usually do when not working that provides a rest with good quality. Personally, I found that if I enjoy something a lot it is hard to stop (like a very interesting book). And if I don't enjoy it, then it is kind of no point in doing it to have rest. I will appreciate both short (like "Hiking") and long comments. Thank you!
Networks of Trust vs Markets
by Henrik Karlsson — 2021-05-31T19:59:19.842Z

Markets are trust reducers. When functional, they make sure that you mainly need to trust one thing: that others will be self-interested. And since, as Adam Smith pointed out, you can trust even butchers and bakers to be self-interested – markets greatly increase the number of people you can trade with.

"Markets!" my econ professor would proclaim in a thick Armenian accent. "If only they were a machine! People would love a machine where you can put in wheat and pick out a helicopter."

That is a marvelous machine.

But one should not forget what it is built for: enabling transactions with strangers. Being able to transact with strangers doesn't mean transacting with strangers is in your self-interest. Not always. Not, I have noticed, as often as I had thought.

Often relying on non-market transactions is more efficient than markets. What is a non-market transaction? It is a set of different things: neighbors providing each other mutual aid, or friends trying to outcompete each other in generosity. Gift economies. Iroquois longhouses. Transactions that take place within your family, your circle of friends, and the people they can refer you to – your network of trust.

Last year, two incidents made me sit down and calculate just how much markets costs me compared to my network of trust. There are a bunch of things that markets can do, but my network can't: assemble the raw material to a computer, ship me a banana. But in areas where I could rely on trust, it turned out to be surprisingly cost-effective.

Friends are cheap

A few weeks after covid-19 closed the borders, I had to ship my furniture from Sweden to a Danish island in the Baltic Sea. At first, I tried markets.

It wasn't easy.

The only shipping company that quoted reasonable-sounding prices turned out to have a business model based on making people's belongings disappear. Alas, I had already signed the contract when I figured this out – a contract that on closer inspection turned out to have a clause that stipulated that if I wanted to break of the deal, I would have to pay the equivalent of a month on a median Scandinavian salary.

This is a very gripping story, but to cut to the chase: after having convinced the criminal truckers that it was in their best interest to drop the case, I called my friend Torbjörn –

"Could you get a vacation next week?"

"Of course." (This is Sweden.)

– and that sav...
What is the Risk of Long Covid after Vaccination?
by dawangy — 2021-05-31T19:32:45.760Z

I received my 2nd shot of the Pfizer vaccine in the middle of April, but I still have some anxieties about some higher risk activities like indoor dining. Mostly, I'm worried about the possibility of long Covid.

This article, although it presents only one anecdote, does show that long Covid is at least possible after being fully vaccinated. As immunity evasive variants grow as a share of new infections, we might even expect this kind of occurrence to become more common as time goes on. A redditor claims that four vaccinated people he knows still ended up symptomatic. He could be lying, but maybe these variants are getting good at their job.

I wish I could present better sources for my concerns but I'm afraid scrappy anecdotes and self reported data is really all we have to work with on this front right now. Or so I thought, until I ran into this preprint from the folks from JoinZOE and the Covid Symptom Study app. If you take a look at tables 8 and 9, you can see that the authors found no evidence for reduced incidence of symptoms lasting >28 days after vaccination in the younger age group (given that infection did occur, of course). The effect was significant in the older age group. I should add that this was self reported data and not a trial.

What are we to make of this? Do vaccines not protect us against long Covid in the way that we hoped they might? Of course, if we don't get infected, this isn't an issue. But if we are infected, then are we really at equal risk of developing long Covid as someone who was infected without vaccination? What other sources out there discuss this?
Zen and Rationality: Continuous Practice
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2021-05-31T18:42:56.950Z

This is post 7/? about the intersection of my decades of LW-style rationality practice and my several years of Zen practice.

In today's installment, I look at continuous practice from a rationalist perspective.

In Zen there is a focus on continuous practice (gyoji dokan in Japanese). The idea has some subtlety lost in translation: it's referencing practice of the Buddha Way that is maintained, preserved, sustained, ceaseless, and persevered through (likened to the need to continually sharpen a frequently used blade against a grinding stone) in a ring or cycle of ongoing change (this is both talking directly about the reality of practice and an allusion to the wheel of life).

Two common ways this shows up in Zen is as both an emphasis on continuing to train the same thing over and over because it's through doing "the same thing" that we come to realize impermanence, and a focus on maintaining one's practice after various "attainments" like kensho or enlightenment. The big idea here is that one is never really done learning and developing, so continual training and practice is necessary to prevent sliding into greater delusion. As a translation of the Bodhisattva's Vow puts it: "dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them".

Although rationality seeks somewhat different purposes than Zen, I think we find a similar current of thought running through rationalist writing, urging rationalists to continually practice the art. Some examples:

Scott Alexander wrote that rationality is a habit to be cultivated. As such, cultivation of that habit requires ongoing work, which he captured with the phrase "constant vigilance".
OODA loops are a technique for continuously reassessing a situation and updating one's response to it. They can be generalized to operate over different scales.
Many rationalists refer to themselves as "aspiring rationalists" in order to make clear that they haven't achieved the goal of being rational, but are instead always working at it.

And I think there's something in the ethos of rationality itself that suggests continuous practice. The idea that rationality is systematized winning carries with it the idea that winning, whatever that means for you, requires ongoing effort to actually use the system—the moment you stop putting in the work to reckon things is the moment you stop winning, even if only marginally. It's only through continuous application...
How do you conduct a personal study retreat?
by Aay17ush — 2021-05-31T14:25:45.687Z

I'm planning a study retreat this week and building my structure based on this comment, but it would be useful to hear from others who have done this before.

Here are a few questions I'd like answers to, but really free-form answers on anything you consider important is useful!

What are the constraints you put on yourself?
What type of goal do you set for the retreat, if any?
Do you plan retreats for narrow or vague explorations?
What works for you? What doesn't?
Anatomy, diseases and aging damage
by ChristianKl — 2021-05-31T14:01:48.364Z

In this post I will talk about how I diagnosed a medical issue of a displaced muscle tendon in myself and solved it. I analyse how our medical ontology is currently ill-equipped to categorize the problem. I discuss the implications for thinking about human aging and why we need to think broader than the seven hallmarks.

Personal experience with a displaced muscle tendon

While I'm normally using a trackball as a mouse, two years ago I went to go co-working and used a normal mouse. I made a bad movement while using the mouse and afterwards my right hand hurt a bit. A few days later my hand was relatively okay, but my hand and arm were still more tense than before.

I asked multiple bodywork people to fix it, but while the arm got more relaxed the issue didn't fully resolve. This week I decided to investigate how my right hand and left hand differ to find out what's going on. I noticed that if I extend my right arm my right hand goes in the direction of the ulna side unless I add tension to keep it in place.

When palpating the ulna head from the dorsal side of my left hand I was touching the ulna head directly. When doing the same thing on the right side, there was something above the ulna head. I formed the hypothesis: "Maybe, the thing I'm palpating is out of place. How about I move it laterally?" I used my fingers to slowly push it laterally.

Afterwards, my right arm started relaxing. I fixed the problem that I produced two years ago in 10-15 seconds of action. I looked up the anatomy and deduced that I moved the tendon of the muscle extensor carpi ulnaris. The tendon is supposed to be lateral of the ulna head and not dorsal. This explains why my hand moved before when extending my arm. Part of extending the arm involves turning the ulna and as the ulna turns, the ulna head presses a bit in the dorsal direction and pushed on the tendon. As a result of pushing on the tendon the extensor carpi ulnaris contract resulting in the movement I observed.

Untreated, this issue might have resulted down the line in carpal tunnel syndrome or back pain down the line. Plausibly, it would have even produced those effects in the two years if I wouldn’t regularly do effective interventions to remove tension.

Conceptualizing the displaced muscle tendon as a ICD 11 illness

Did I have an illness that I cured and if yes, what illness? The current official ontology for illnesses is w...
TEAM: a dramatically improved form of therapy
by Jakob_J — 2021-05-31T13:33:37.016Z

Note: The information provided below is not medical advice, and should not be treated as such. Please seek the advice of your physician with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.

I believe a new form of psychotherapy has been found that is significantly more effective than more conventional therapies such as CBT. Despite this, it is unlikely to replace these in the near term. One of the many reasons for this is that the most complete source is found in a relatively obscure podcast, and it takes listening through hundreds of hour-long episodes in order to fully grasp how radically different it is from more conventional schools of therapy. However, the time investment is worth it: my own moods have improved drastically, and my life has been transformed after discovering this podcast. I frequently find that I can not only resolve most of my own mood problems at an early stage, I am also able to better empathise with others without jumping straight to “problem-solving” in a way that would be counterproductive and annoying to the other person.

The podcast is called Feeling Good, and is run by David Burns who is the author of the bestselling self-help book Feeling Good and one of the earliest practitioners of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). In the podcast, he introduces his new form of therapy: TEAM (also known as TEAM-CBT). TEAM is heavily influenced by CBT but actually draws from a wide range of different schools of thought (TEAM stands for Testing, Empathy, Assessment of resistance, Methods, where methods can include anything from exposure, acceptance, Gestalt therapy, et.c.).

CBT and TEAM

Building on the work of Karen Horney and Albert Ellis among others, Aaron Beck and David Burns found that depressed patients often had thoughts that were not only negative and self-critical, but also illogical; they categorised these into several “cognitive distortions”: all or nothing-thinking, overgeneralization, fortune telling, mental filter, et.c. By making patients see how factually and logically wrong their negative thoughts were, they often saw rapid recovery even in severely depressed patients. This is the foundation of CBT, which due to its effectiveness has become the most widely practiced form of psychotherapy.

Despite the success of CBT, David Burns still found that a significant minority of his patients were remarkably resistant to treatment....
Pomodoros worked during a day: an analysis of Alex’s data
by Derek M. Jones — 2021-05-31T13:27:50.631Z
Link: http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2021/05/30/pomodoros-worked-during-a-day-an-analysis-of-alexs-data/

Regular readers know that I am always on the lookout for software engineering data. One search technique is to feed a 'magic' phrase into a search engine, this can locate data hiding in plain sight. This week the magic phrase: "record of pomodoros" returned pages discussing two collections of daily Pomodoros worked, each over a year, plus several possible collections, i.e., not explicitly stated. My email requests for data have so far returned one of the collections, kindly made available by Alex Altair, and this post discusses Alex's data (I have not discussed the data with Alex, who I'm hoping won't laugh too loud at the conclusions I have reached).

Before analyzing data I always make predictions about what I expect to see. I know from the email containing the data that it consisted of two columns: date and Pomodoro's worked, i.e., no record of task names. The first two predictions for this data were the two most common patterns seen in estimation data, i.e., use of round numbers, and a weekend-effect (most people don't work during the weekend and the autocorrelation of the daily counts contain peaks at lags of 6 and 7). The third prediction was that over time the daily total Pomodoro counts would refine into counts for each of the daily tasks (I had looked at the first few lines of the data and seen totals for the daily Pomodoros worked.

The Renzo Pomodoro dataset is my only previous experience analysing Pomodoro data. Renzo created a list of tasks for the day, estimated the number of Pomodoros for each task would take, and recorded how many it actually took. For comparison, the SiP effort estimation dataset estimates software engineering tasks in hours.

Alex uses Pomodoros as a means of focusing his attention on the work to be done, and the recorded data is a measure of daily Pomodoro work done.

I quickly discovered that all my predictions were wrong, i.e., no obvious peaks showing use of round numbers, no weekend effect, and always daily totals. Ho-hum.

The round number effect is very prominent in estimates, but is not always visible in actuals; unless people are aiming to meet targets or following Parkinson's law.

How many days had one Pomodoro worked, how many two Pomodoro, etc? The plot below shows the number of days for which a given number of Pomodoros were worked (the number of days with zero P...