trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
COVID-19 response as XRisk intervention
by polyphony — 2020-04-10T06:22:19.969Z

Thank you to the reviewers of this post: Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, Robin Hanson, Anders Sandberg, Allison Duettmann, Andre Ornish, Jessica Taylor, and Blake Borgeson.

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Effective Altruists and rationalists are some of the only people in the world tracking existential risks (XRisks). And so it’s understandable that some of us would ask: “Is this a distraction?” Surely a crisis that ends many lives pales in comparison to crises that could end all of them.

However, this line of reasoning might make long-termists lose sight of a large opportunity: we can build XRisk prevention capacity *through* pandemic response efforts. Through fighting COVID-19, we can:

1. Train ourselves

2. Forge alliances

3. Establish credibility

4. Grow the global risk movement

5. Create XRisk infrastructure

I’ll go through these by category.

Training Ourselves

Now that we’re dealing with a live global catastrophe, there’s a chance to develop our skills and ability to coordinate for future global catastophes.

Here are some particularly relevant areas for skill growth:

• Forecasting: Create predictions of what might happen and be proven right or wrong.

• Scenario-planning: Run inside-view and outside-view simulations of your proposed COVID-19 intervention, act accordingly, and then improve your simulation abilities based on what actually happened.

• Coordination: Pandemic response efforts will often require that you collaborate with a wide variety of different actors, just like with other global risks.

• Persuasive argumentation: This skill can be built through convincing others that your project is worth supporting, or through influencing decision-makers.

• Networking: Navigate the complicated world of crisis-response to find others to aid and work with. Your project might require you to form connections with epidemiologists, with front-line responders, with public officials, with manufacturing plants, with fellow activists, and more.

• Project management: Develop the ability to set and meet deadlines at a moment when they really matter. Learn how to lead other people. Find and use the best tools for tracking tasks. Document and curate best practices (this can help other projects as well).

Perhaps the greatest opportunity here is for EAs and rationalists to improve their existing comparative advantage: appli...
[U.S. Specific] Free money (~$5k-$30k) for Independent Contractors and grant recipients from U.S. government
by Eli Tyre — 2020-04-10T05:00:35.435Z

[crossposted from the EA Forum]

Epistemic Status: I spent the past couple of days looking into this, but there is far more that I don’t know than that I do. I may be wrong about some of this, and this certainly has gaps and omissions. If you know something I don’t, or you think something here is wrong, please say so in the comments.

tldr: The US government is giving away several hundred billions of dollars to small businesses as part of COVID-19 stimulus. If you are an independent contractor who received income in 2019, you are eligible for (on average) $10,000 to $30,000. The process for applying for that money as an independent contractor is somewhat tricky, and so this post is to guide you through it.

We expect money to be allocated on a first come, first serve basis, and to run out fast, so we recommend that you follow these steps ASAP. From what we can tell almost all banks stopped accepting applications for the business-version of this program within 6 hours of opening their applications, so time is really of the essence here. For independent contractors this program starts on April 10th (tomorrow), for everyone else it started on April 3rd.

Peter Hurford

made a post about this

same program two weeks ago where he mostly talked about the opportunities for charities. This post is about the opportunities for independent contractors and sole proprietors, which should also include many grant recipients.

This post is broken into two sections, the first describes how to apply for a EIDL loan (likely worth at minimum something like $1000), and the second describes how to apply for the paycheck protection program (probably worth ~0.2 * your annual income for 2019).

EIDL program

What is an EIDL?

EIDL stands for “Economic Injury Disaster Loan”, and is described

here

.

While the term used is “loan”, the “loan” in question does not have to be repaid, making this effectively a taxfree grant.

In response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, small business owners in all U.S. states, Washington D.C., and territories are eligible to apply for an Economic Injury Disaster Loan advance of up to $10,000. This advance will provide economic relief to businesses that are currently experiencing a temporary loss of revenue. Funds will be made available following a successful application. This loan advance will not have to be r

...
Why don't we have active human trials with inactivated SARS-COV-2?
by ChristianKl — 2020-04-09T19:40:15.922Z

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

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

Is there a reason this is more complicated then I think? Have I missed something else? Otherwise what's the reason that there are no such trials going on?
Testing and contact tracing impact assessment model?
by JustinShovelain — 2020-04-09T17:42:13.236Z

What is a good model for assessing the effect of testing and contact tracing on R0?

I'm imagining it would have parameters perhaps like:

testing frequency
testing result delay
time
viral load (varies with time)
testing false negatives (probably varies with viral load)
path through environment (varies with viral load - i.e. if very sick they self isolate)
number of people who intersect that path (perhaps weighted by distance and duration)
emission filtration (aka masks)
reception filtration (aka masks)
percentage of the population tested on a regular frequency (or more complex arrangements if you wish to build that in)
percentage of people who go into isolation if they test positive or are requested to do so as a precautionary measure because of the contact tracing conclusions
contact tracing density - maybe only 50% of the population is part of the network
how deep in the contact tracing web it is recommended to self isolate (perhaps varying with testing frequency because it spreads in time)
the growth rate in time (which depends on a lot of the parameters above)
some sums or integrals over time and when the testing occurred
something something default parameters (some of which can be determined by the original R0 and doubling time of covid-19)
something something initial conditions
maybe including the percentage of the population already infected or recovered
maybe something something pooled tests or randomized population testing
maybe something something contact graph structure
if very ambitious adding things like packages or perhaps other

animals

that may be able to catch and transmit it

Ideally it would be able to answer questions like: How much does it decrease R0 if you test 90% of people every 10 days with a false negative rate of 15%, an isolation compliance rate of 85%, a contact tracing web that is 50% dense, and a proactive quarantine over the contact tracing web that is two contacts deep?
Why I'm Not Vegan
by jefftk — 2020-04-09T13:00:02.444Z

While many people in the effective altruism movement are vegan, I'm
not, and I wanted to write some about why. The short answer is what
while I'm on board with the general idea of making sacrifices to help
others I think veganism doesn't represent a very good tradeoff, and I
think we should put our altruistic efforts elsewhere.

There are many reasons people decide to eat vegan food, from ethics to
taste to health, and I'm just interested in the ethical perspective.
As a consequentialist, the way I see this is, how would the world be
different if I stopped eating animals and animal products?

One factor is that I wouldn't be buying animal products anymore, which
would reduce the demand for animals, and correspondingly the amount
supplied. Elasticity
means that if I decrease by buying by one unit I expect production to
fall by less than one unit, but I'm going to ignore that here to be
on the safe side. Peter Hurford gives
a very rough set of numbers for how many animals continuously living are required to
support a standard American diet and gets:

1/8 of a cow

1/8 of a pig

3 chickens

3 fish

For example, a typical American consumes about a quarter of a pig per
year, and these pigs live about six months, so that's 1/8 of a pig on
an ongoing basis. I haven't checked his numbers in detail, but there
are

78M
pigs and 327M people in the US, so one pig for every four people, and
once you consider that we

export
a lot of pork this seems in the right range.

Now, I don't think animals matter as much as humans. I think there's
a very large chance they don't matter at all, and that there's just no
one inside to suffer, but to be safe I'll assume they do. If animals
do matter, I think they still matter substantially less than humans,
so if we're going to compare our altruistic options we need a rough
exchange rate between animal and human experience. Conditional on
animals mattering, averting how many animal-years on a factory farm do I see as
being about as good as giving a human another year of life?

Pigs: about 100. Conditions for pigs are
very bad, though I still think humans matter a lot more.

Chickens: about 1,000. They probably matter much less than pigs.

Cows: about 10,000. They probably matter about the same as pigs,
but their conditions are far better.

Fish: about 100,000. They matter much less than chickens.

These are...
COVID-19: List of ideas to reduce the direct harm from the virus, with an emphasis on unusual ideas
by JustinShovelain — 2020-04-09T11:33:28.904Z

This is a collection of ideas on what interventions could be investigated, funded, or implemented to potentially reduce the harms from COVID-19 by intervening directly on the causal chain leading to infection and death. In particular, it has a lot of “unusual ideas” that haven’t gotten much attention yet.

Caveats: Most of the “unusual ideas” (see later section) were generated or vetted only quickly. Before implementation, they will definitely need further investigation, and some are only meant to serve as inspiration for better interventions. But capacity to implement them if they do work can generally be built in parallel with investigating whether they work. Further, it’s also possible that some things here could have consequences worse than the disease (stuff like surveillance states, long term harm from bad vaccinations, or dual use dangerous biotechnology). Therefore, the suggestion here is to pour a lot of resources into investigating those particularly risky options, rather than to immediately and

unilaterally

implement them.

As the surrounding context to keep in mind, we want to:

Stop this pandemic in its tracks
Minimize lives lost, economic disruption, psychological harm, and political harm done directly by the disease or our responses to it
Perhaps, if lucky, find a way to make humanity better off afterwards

For some related research topics check out

Coronavirus Research Ideas for EAs

.

A general list of things for interfering with the causal chain of infection and death

In this section, I’ll list categories of interventions to reduce the harm from COVID-19. These should ideally be investigated and implemented in parallel at speed for something as disruptive as this virus. Some of these are being implemented by varying degrees in nations fighting the pandemic.

Large scale prevention of exposure: Social distancing and managing packages and surfaces
Small scale of prevention of exposure: Physically blocking the virus before it gets to the body

masks
sanitation
etc.

Chemical interventions once it has entered the body: Vaccines, antivirals
Physiological support once it has entered the body: Stuff like ventilator production and supplemental oxygen
Meta: Investigate the alternative causal pathways to death and hypotheses about them; answering questions like: how much damage and death is due to lung damage, cytokine st

...
[Announcement] LessWrong will be down for ~1 hour on the evening of April 10th around 10PM PDT (5:00AM GMT)
by habryka — 2020-04-09T05:09:24.241Z

LessWrong's database provider (Mlab) has been acquired by a separate company (MongoDB) and as such our database needs to be migrated to that new provider. In order to do that, there will be about half an hour of downtime on Friday (April 10th) between 10PM and 11PM.

Sorry for the inconvenience.
The Sandwich Argument
by Chris_Leong — 2020-04-09T03:58:46.682Z

Today I saw a very interesting argument pattern.

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

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

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

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

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

See also: Motte and Bailey, Shit Sandwich
Ways you can get sick without human contact
by Connor_Flexman — 2020-04-08T22:41:07.384Z

(Tl;dr: food, animals, and yourself are all carriers of disease that the average person gets ~.2x/year normally; if you include immune reaction despite non-illness, the rough base rate is probably anywhere from .02x/year to ∞x/year and depends heavily on person; my own odds seem like ~10:1 non-COVID to COVID given a symptom, but yours are different; I'm not a doctor and don't have metis on this, maybe I say stupid things)

Now that people have been shut away for weeks, they've (reasonably) expected to stop getting colds and things. But I've now seen at least 3 cases, one with an extremely high level of quarantine, where someone still got a cold-like illness. This affords a few hypotheses:

Perhaps the base rate for sickness with no human contact is not as low as we thought
Perhaps disease spread takes more advantage of tiny amounts of contact than one would expect from a model of p(illness) ∝ amount of pathogen contacted
Perhaps people are terrible at quarantining

I don’t think it’s the last, and the second one is interesting but hard to investigate, so this post will be about the first hypothesis: can people easily get sick while alone?

I'm going to sketch a catalogue of the options and roughly divide these apparent illnesses into two groups: those spread by significant external amounts of pathogen vs minor internal amounts of pathogen. (Base rate estimates at the end.)

Significant external amounts of pathogen

The three main sources of these illnesses are food, fauna, and fecal.

Food poisoning can be caused by lots of different types of bacteria. For example, Campylobacter, Clostridium, Staphylococcus, and E. Coli seem to be some of the main culprits, but there are many others (and

80% of cases

appear to be caused by agents we haven’t identified!). These present like "stomach flu", often for 1-6 days after 1-10 days of incubation.

Apparently

a lot of the diseases dogs spread overlap with food poisoning bacteria (and even norovirus, which also presents as stomach flu).

A lot of fecal-to-oral infections

appear

to be from similar bacteria. (Edited for clarity) For the purposes of this post, we're ignoring diseases from other people’s fecal matter, and some of these are obviously spread person-to-person, like adenovirus. But the four listed above (can I call them the Big Four since they keep ...
English summaries of German Covid-19 expert podcast
by Chi Nguyen — 2020-04-08T20:29:25.221Z
Link: https://www.notion.so/NDR-Coronavirus-update-with-Christian-Drosten-podcast-summaries-7f230087f3d643db9b1dbab671f07427

We'll start providing unofficial English summaries of the NDR coronavirus update podcast (see notion linked). The podcast provides weekdaily interviews with Christian Drosten.

Christian Drosten is leading the virology department at the German university hospital "Charite" in Berlin. He co-developed the PCR test that Germany is using to detect SARS-CoV2 (the virus causing Covid-19), is continuing to research Covid-19 and consulting the German government. He has been researching Coronaviruses, including the old SARS, for many years.

Important: We are no virologists, epidemologist, medics or have any other relevant expertise. We are lay people trying to write up Christian Drosten's evaluations as good as possible without verifying anything he says and we might misrepresent some things. Christian Drosten himself is not the relevant expert for some of the niche topics he talks about and gives informed guesses which he sometimes revises at later times. None of this should be taken at face value without double checking.

German transcripts (time-lag of one day) are available here.

Here is yesterday's summary written by Chau Nguyen with some editing from me:

Episode 29: 2020/04/07 - We need to target testing better

We don't know how most infections occur

Too early to find a good answer
Lockdown means most infections currently occur in private households which gives us no indication on how infections would happen in "real" daily life.
Early stage of the pandemic means we don't have enough data, yet

Ceiling for scaling up testing makes targeted testing and tracing apps more important

Germany

Last week around 350k tests were reported even though the RKI (Germany's public health institute) predicted for 500k

Possible explanation 1: Some tests might not be reported yet and will be reported in the upcoming days
Possible explanation 2: Shortage of certain resources such as reagents or swabs might be hitting the test centres as all European countries have an increased demands for these resources - there is also anecdotal evidence for this

Politicians started reaching out to companies asking why their country's demand is not being met

Global

Conclusion: Even if test centres are able to increase efficiency, the necessary resources (reagents, swabs) are a bottleneck, so we can't increase testing as necessary
Upshot: We need to target

...
The Ethics of Ventilators
by palisatrium — 2020-04-08T20:15:54.349Z

Sadly, there will likely come a time soon where doctors will need to triage ventilator removal from patients. A few thoughts:

1. How does removing a ventilator square with the code of "First do no harm?"

2. Should ventilators be rationed by occupation? For example, should doctors and nurses be given priority given that they may be save future lives? Conversely, should we de-prioritize convicted violent criminals?

3. Should likely future years be taken into account? Should a 30 year old get precedence over a 75 year old?

Right now, it appears that the guidelines for New York are to treat every life as a life so long as it isn't a child (they get preference). Doctors look at something called a SOFA score to determine the likelihood of survival and allocate based on saving the maximum number of lives.
What should I study to understand real-world economics? (I.e., To gain financial literacy)
by Rudi C — 2020-04-08T19:22:02.807Z

I have taken a basic economics course and read some academic economic stuff here and there, but these have been viscerally “theoretical” in nature. I want to understand real-world concepts like value chains, stocks, venture capital, IPO, corporations (I can’t quite say I know what a corporation IS.) ... . The best resource I have found to date is http://stratechery.com . I am wondering if more efficient learning material exists. I don’t want advice/prediction books (on management or investing). I simply want to understand the basic stuff about these concepts. Financial literacy, I would say. I don’t know if there is a name for this ”field of study.”
COVID-19 and the US Elections
by jmh — 2020-04-08T18:25:20.425Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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