trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Long covid: probably worth avoiding—some considerations
by KatjaGrace — 2022-01-16T11:46:52.087Z

I hear friends reasoning, “I’ll get covid eventually and long covid probably isn’t that bad; therefore it’s not worth much to avoid it now”. Here are some things informing my sense that that’s an error:

A. Really bad anecdotes aren’t hard to find.

I asked for people’s long-covid experiences on Twitter and got more than a hundred comments mostly full of truly awful stories, almost entirely from people I don’t know at all, presumably somehow brought via the active Long Covid community.

This is a bit hard to interpret as a datum, due to the intense selection effects involved, but my main inferences are:

The bad tail gets very bad.

This bad tail is less like a quantitative reduction in labor, and more like psychological torment, being very sleep deprived or brain damaged while dealing with a host of legitimately scary health problems (see below) than I had been picturing.

The very bad part of the bad tail is not tiny. Like, if I requested lightning strike experiences, I don’t think I would get this kind of response.

See this for more heavily selected but still scary anecdotes about what bad cases can look like.

B. Bad anecdotes are common enough to show up in my vicinity.

Among this cascade of terrible stories is a response from one of the handful of people from my extended network who I already knew had had covid, Oxford machine learning professor Michael Osborne. I take this as strong evidence that that level of bad experience isn’t vanishingly rare, though he has been well for the last few months, so this is only direct evidence of this kind of thing happening for about two years.

Excerpts from his account:

My own low-points: early on, I collapsed, shaking, and was taken to A&E in an ambulance. A year later, I did not have the energy to leave the house. Formerly, I was a marathon runner, but I brought on a bad relapse with a 700m walk. Many people have it much, much, worse. 2/

— Michael A Osborne (@maosbot) October 19, 2021
Trying to Keep the Garden Well
by Tobias H — 2022-01-16T05:42:11.851Z

I used to live in city-subsidized housing. It was an apartment complex with a big garden.
To enjoy the garden in the summer, residents started putting old chairs and a table outside. Once summer was over, they didn't bother to take them inside again. The table became weathered and didn't offer a pleasant sight anymore.
The city noticed and put up a letter on the apartment board saying that having your own furniture in the garden was unorderly and threatened that any furniture that wasn't removed from the garden by the end of the month would be disposed of.

(You might want to quickly think about the long-run effects this letter had.)

In the following weeks, the residents dumped their old sofas, broken beds, televisions and, what-not into the garden. Normally, disposing of large items like this required you to have a car, drive the items to a disposal yard and pay a fee. However, the city had just made it free.

Or so the residents thought.

Of course, the city didn't think of following through with their threat anymore. Removing a couple of chairs and a table would have fit in a normal workday of a city janitor. Removing this pile of trash would have been costly.

The months went on, the sofas were wet, nobody used the garden anymore.
I moved away soon after.
Target for Tonight: A Drama In One Act
by vernamcipher — 2022-01-16T04:29:40.052Z

(Cross posted from my Substack, A Flood of Ideas - https://mflood.substack.com/p/target-for-tonight-a-drama-in-one)

Sources:

Max Hastings, Bomber Command
Frederick M. Sallagar, The Road to Total War (available online)
“Target for Tonight,” 1941 RAF propaganda film (available online)

TARGET FOR TONIGHT A Drama in One-Act

(picture generated by VQGAN+CLIP)

By M. Flood

Setting: It is the night of August 25, 1941, just after 8 o'clock. We are in a Royal Air Force Bomber Command airfield somewhere in the southeast of England. This is the barracks room of Second Squadron of D Station, Bomber Group 22. The previous day the Luftwaffe dropped bombs on London for the first time, the first time a civilian area has been deliberately targeted during the conflict.

Characters: The crew of G Bomber, a twin-engine Vickers Wellington. These men have been flying together for a year. They are twenty-nine missions into a thirty-mission tour. If they survive tonight, they will be rotated off active duty to training section for a much needed rest.

Together they have been through lightning strikes, fogged in landings, anti-aircraft fire, and one memorable near miss with a cow that had wandered onto their runway. They trust and depend on one another totally. The stress is wearing them down, though, and each crew member is manifesting that strain in his own way.

• Captain Derek Lewis (Pilot, 24) - A calm and competent professional on the outside. In the air, he has total confidence in himself and his crew. On the ground, the last twenty-nine missions and countless near-misses have left him almost cripplingly superstitious.

• Sergeant Christopher Sims (Co-Pilot, 23) - A joker, also a great sportsman. When on the ground he drives his motorcycle too fast, has one too many drinks at the puband at mess dinners, and tries a pass at any pretty woman he meets – anything to have the risks be entirely in his own hands.

• Sergeant Perry Anderton (Navigator/Bombardier, 23) - Outwardly a gung-ho ladies man, Anderton is the team's backbone and cheerleader. He thinks he is the one keeping the crew sane and happy, but really their belief in him is keeping him together. No one is aware of it, least of all him, but he is the closest to cracking.

• Sergeant Andrew Nichols (Wireless Operator, 21) - Not superstitious, he has a mathematician’s grasp of probability and risk - it's what he was studying at Cambridge before...
Reflections on Connect Developers
by Adam Zerner — 2022-01-16T00:20:48.883Z

I was working on creating a projects page for my personal website, https://adamzerner.bearblog.dev/. It hit me how many of my projects have been failures, and that I should reflect on them to see what I can learn. Perhaps I'll reflect on other ones in a future blog post, but here I want to reflect on a project that I am declaring a failure today: Connect Developers.

Here is how Connect Developers works. It's for programmers/developers. Developers fill out a fun survey, answering questions like "Performant code is important" vs "It's the root of all evil". Answering 1 would mean you feel very strongly that it is important. Answering 10 would mean you feel very strongly that it is the root of all evil.

Then you get put in touch with other developers who answered questions similarly to you. Eg. you'd get an email saying something like "You and Alice both answered the questions similarly and have been matched. Go ahead and set up a video call (Zoom, Google Meet, etc.)!"

I figured that this would be a fun thing to do. Answering the survey seems fun. And video chatting with likeminded developers also seems fun. Well, I know that not everyone is eager to have a video call with random strangers on the internet, but not everyone has to! I figure that there is some sort of normal distribution going on.

Some people are really averse to talking to strangers on the internet. Other people are very eager to do so. Most are somewhere in between. But since there are so many developers out there, I only need that light blue group. Or, rather, only a fraction of it.

Despite the project's failure, I actually still feel reasonably confident that the audience exists. The problem is that capturing this audience — really, nearly any audience — is tricky.

I think the chicken-egg problem is a huge reason why. Here's what I mean.

Imagine you come across the project in a Tech Crunch article talking about how cool this new app is that lets you connect with like-minded developers, and tells a few interesting stories about people who met through the app and ended up becoming friends. In that scenario, I expect people to be reasonably open to and interested in using it. Now, separately, imagine that you come across the project in the "new" section of Hacker News, see it only has two upvotes, no comments, and it looks like it was hacked together in a few hours as a side project. In that scenario, ...
Nudging My Way Out Of The Intellectual Mosh Pit
by Elizabeth — 2022-01-15T23:40:02.617Z

As part of my ongoing effort to improve my cost/benefit ratio on social media, I’m nudging myself away from intellectual mosh pit platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and towards blog posts, articles, videos essays, etc. Really longform consumption (e.g. books) remains about the same, my limitations on that are mostly my insistence on fact-checking nonfiction and very narrow tastes in fiction, this post is about changing what I reach for when I’m bored in a line. Towards that goal I have made a few changes, which I list here roughly in ascending order of how much effort they were:

Put all of my screens in greyscale. If you only try one thing on this list, make it this one. It takes five seconds to test once you have instructions, and the relief for me was immediate and has lasted days so far. Every time I have to turn color on to look at graphs I resent it.

Instructions for OS X.
Instructions for iPhone and older Android (untested).
Instructions for modern Android.
Windows users: you’re on your own I only use Windows for games.

Discovered the existence of Focus Mode for android, which allows you to use the internet but disables notifications.

All of the Focus Mode instructions require several clicks into a deep menu. You can access it more easily by enabling the relevant fast-access card, using the instructions for older Android phones above.

Moved all my short-OODA-loop apps off my phone home in favor of long-OODA-loop apps.

The newly defavored apps include obvious candidates like Twitter, but also all messaging apps and Chrome itself.
The new stars include my article aggregator, as well as very long-form content like Kindle, Audible, and PodCatcher.
The home screen continues to hold non-content-consumption apps I want to access quickly, like Maps, Calendar, etc.

Resumed use of a read-it-later tool, which lets me save cool articles I see on social media to be consumed when I’m in a better head space (I can’t switch between reading microblogs and regular blogs quickly – different headspace ).
Switched to an RSS reader that lets me read things out of order without marking earlier articles as Read.
Combined my RSS feeds, email newsletters, and saved articles in a single service (that lets me read in any order) so I can choose from all my essay-length options at once. This was a stupid amount of effort and yak shaving and it’s not pretty but I got it working.

...
Personal blogging as self-imposed oppression
by xarkn — 2022-01-15T14:51:59.676Z

You Should Start a Blog Right Now!

Or should you? You can find some blog posts about the benefits of blogging but I can't think of many that explore the potential harms. I can think of some reasons why blogging — especially under your real identity — could waste your time, make you a worse thinker, and limit your social and professional opportunities.

1. Blogging will give society more influence over your thinking.

Imagine if any stranger off the street could come and visit your home. How would that change your behavior? Probably you would make sure there is nothing offensive or too personal around, and you'd spend more time making your home look neat and presentable, with your shelves lined with books you feel give a good impression of yourself. A personal blog is like opening a public door to your mind. Do you really think that you won't clean up the contents for the sake of public appearances?

2. It will enforce your current beliefs and identity.

Writing about your beliefs and claims in public will make those a stronger part of your identity. They will stay as obstacles before adopting new views and information, because you have to reconcile the new with your newly-questionable but previously proud content. If you instead keep your thoughts and beliefs anonymous, you can accept all the new information you want without worrying about your old digital garden misleading the public or causing embarrassment.

Learning you were wrong about something:

No blog --> Update your beliefs.
Yes blog --> Update your beliefs, and all relevant blog posts.

3. It will make your beliefs visible.

If you write about X, people will know what you think of X. This will matter if X is or becomes controversial, and may limit your social and professional opportunities. You will lose opportunities with some people who strongly disagree with you on X. The first impression will already have been made before you meet.

Maybe you write about rationalist views, and your hippie friend will be just barely enough put off that you won't get an invite to their summer parties. Or you have a nice uncle you'd like to spend more time with, but their father was a butcher and you wrote essays about veganism.

If you instead had kept your thinking to yourself, you'd have an easier time reaching out to people you might enjoy as friends, even if you disagree on some important ideas.

4. It might make you less int...
How Bad Is QWERTY, Really? A Review of the Literature, such as It Is

by Erich_Grunewald — 2022-01-15T12:07:55.390Z
Link: https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/how-bad-is-qwerty-really-a-review-of-the-literature-such-as-it-is/

Some six or so years ago, not long after I had started working as a programmer, I developed a bad case of repetitive strain injury (RSI) and for a while couldn't use my left hand for typing, but had to rely on my right hand and dictation. This situation being obviously untenable, I took action: I purchased an ergonomic keyboard (Microsoft Sculpt), remapped shift to the space bar when pressed in combination with another key, started doing hand/wrist stretches and switched from typing on the QWERTY layout to Colemak. This grab bag of interventions worked, my RSI got better and, though it still flares up sometimes, I now have it under control.

I have stuck with Colemak since then and have liked it and occasionally even recommended it to friends and colleagues. But beyond reading popular articles about the topic, I never really looked into the evidence on key layouts and ergonomics[1] and productivity[2] – until now, that is!

Before we get to the good stuff, a word of caution. I am in no way an expert on this; I estimate I spent roughly 15-25 hours researching and taking notes, so there is still a lot that I'm uncertain about. My target group here is touch-typing office workers, typing mainly in English, without disabilities that significantly impede their typing (e.g. the loss of an arm or that sort of thing). For people who don't touch-type, QWERTY is probably fine. For people who have disabilities that affect their typing, I assume special considerations, of which I know little, apply.

Summary

My current model on the RSI risk is something like this. The evidence has made me update towards the risk of developing serious RSI from keyboard use being small. I had a pretty strong prior, based on what I've heard from other programmers and on my own experience, that it often causes RSI. I still think it's a risk, but not as large as I did before, though with lots of uncertainty (80% confidence interval would be 2%-20% chance of developing keyboard RSI over a lifetime for the aforementioned target group). I think key layout is a minor part of the ergonomic harms of keyboard use; keyboard type (i.e. ergonomics of design) and posture/positioning both seem more important (70% confidence).

As for productivity, compared to e.g. Dvorak or Colemak, QWERTY seems somewhat slower for typing on the margin (80% confidence). But most people, and most programmers even, don't type eno...
Look For Principles Which Will Carry Over To The Next Paradigm
by johnswentworth — 2022-01-14T20:22:58.606Z

In 1918, Emmy Noether published her famous theorem showing that each symmetry of the laws of physics implies a corresponding conserved quantity. Laws which remain the same even if we move the whole universe left or right a little result in conservation of momentum, laws which remain the same over time result in conservation of energy, and so forth.

At the time, Noether’s Theorem was only proven for the sorts of systems used in classical physics - i.e. a bunch of differential equations derived by minimizing an “action”. Over the next few decades, the foundational paradigm shifted from classical to quantum, and Noether’s original proof did not carry over. But the principle - the idea that symmetries imply conserved quantities - did carry over. Indeed, the principle is arguably simpler and more elegant in quantum mechanics than in classical.

This is the sort of thing I look for in my day-to-day research: principles which are simple enough, fundamental enough, and general enough that they’re likely to carry over to the next paradigm. I don’t know what the next paradigm will be, yet; the particulars of a proof or formulation of a problem might end up obsolete. But I look for principles which I expect will survive, even if the foundations shift beneath them.

Examples In My Own Work

My own day-to-day research focuses on modelling abstraction.

I generally build these models on a framework of probability, information theory, and causal models. I know that this framework will not cover all of abstraction - for example, it doesn’t cover mathematical abstractions like “addition” or “linearity”. Those abstractions are built into the structure of logic, and probability theory takes all of logic as given. There may be some way in which the abstraction of linearity lets me answer some broad class of questions more easily, but standard probability and information theory ignore all that by just assuming that all pure-logic questions are answered for free.

… yet I continue to use this probability/information/causality framework, rather than throwing it away and looking for something more general on which to build the theory. Why? Well, I expect that this framework is general enough to figure out principles which will carry over to the next paradigm. I can use this framework to talk about things like “throwing away information while still accurately answering queries” or “information...
Survey supports ‘long covid is bad’ hypothesis (very tentative)
by KatjaGrace — 2022-01-14T14:50:18.538Z

I wanted more clues about whether we live in a world where really bad long covid outcomes are vanishingly rare (but concentrated a lot in my Twitter) or in a world where for instance a large fraction of ‘brain fogs’ reported are anything like the horrors sometimes described. I went to Positly, hoping that a randomish sample of people who want my money would answer.

I hope to write something more careful about this survey soon, especially if it is of interest, but figure the basic data is better to share sooner. This summary is not very careful, and may e.g. conflate slightly differently worded questions, or fail to exclude obviously confused answers, or slightly miscount.

This is a survey of ~200 Positly survey takers, all between 20 and 40 years old. Very few of the responses I’ve looked at seem incoherent or botlike, unlike the survey I did around the time of the election.

Results

Have you had covid?

Yes: 57

No: 151

Unsure: 22

Do you seem to have ongoing health problems after recovering from acute covid illness?

Yes: 12 out of 57 = 21%

Are you currently working less as a result of the covid pandemic?

“Yes, because I had covid and it left me with ongoing problems with physical or mental health” - about 6 tick this, though often in conjunction with other yes explanations.

=> 10% rate of people apparently working less at least partly due to Long Covid, among those who’ve had covid

(Also, here is an example of someone responding that they work just as much as before:

‘I am a registered nurse, so I am around a lot of COVID. The lingering symptom that has been the worst is the fatigue. I feel like I am never rested. It actually lead to a car accident because I fell asleep driving after the second round of COVID…’

Finding good questions is tricky - in a bad enough situation everyone might be doing very badly and yet look more productive due to necessity.)

Agreement with a list of checkable statements about their lives

8 people unambiguously checked boxes agreeing with statements that sounded especially brutal to me (they could check as many as they wanted from a longer list including less brutal things):

I feel substantially cognitively damaged

I am unable to walk up stairs without resting

I am less markedly able to think clearly, more than half the hours of the day

My life is miserable

(I’m tentatively not including people who seemed to give conflicting answer...
School Daze
by Zvi — 2022-01-14T13:50:00.552Z

In our educational system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups. The children who have committed no crime, and the adults who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.

We need to close the schools to slow the spread, they said. But what profit us to close the schools, if most everyone is getting Omicron anyway, the schools aren’t less safe than what kids would do anyway, and the kids were never in real danger?

We need to do remote learning if we close the schools, they said. But what does ‘remote learning’ accomplish in its current form, other than to ensure children are properly punished for the crime of being children? Teaching them that society wants them to suffer and that their success depends on obeying arbitrary rules while looking like they are looking into a computer screen all day and ‘paying attention’ without secretly doing anything useful or fun? Teaching them how to get around such rules?

We need to keep the schools open, they said. No one is learning anything with this ‘remote learning,’ they (correctly) said. But what profit us to keep the schools open if no one is doing any learning there either, no matter what you think of a normal school day, because the rules and obsessions regarding Covid-19, combined with absences, render the entire operation non-functional? What profit all these precautions, tests, isolations and rules, if they transparently don’t identify the sick and keep them out of the building, and in many cases create situations that look quite a bit like superspreader events?

No profits. Only pain.

Because all these options have one key thing in common.

They all fail to Play to Win the Game.

Or at least, they fail it for any good game. For any game where winning is preferable.

The Game is up to you. You define what winning means.

The Game can be learning reading, writing and arithmetic, probability and statistics, economics, history, science, art and music, or anything else you care to teach. The Game can be to cultivate their creativity, or give them socialization. The Game can be our children not suffering and not being depressed and suicidal. The Game can be the living of life.

If you’re cynical but not too cynical, The Game can be allowing parents to go to work and society to function. It can be teaching children how to sit still and control themselves, and how to guess the teacher’s password...