trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
An alarm bell for the next pandemic
by DirectedEvolution — 2020-04-06T01:35:03.283Z

See my new post, "An alarm bell for the next pandemic, V. 2," for updated criteria and more historical investigation.

My last post analyzed whether the sheer volume of COVID-19 posts on LessWrong could have alerted an average reader to the seriousness of the coming pandemic. I concluded that the answer was "no." Other posters pointed out that some people did bring it up early, and that we still did an above-average job at acknowledging and preparing for the pandemic. But I am still looking for a reliable alarm bell that will ring loud enough to hear it before the stock market crashes 20% next time there's a pandemic on the horizon.

This is my attempt.

Note: This questionnaire has passed two of my historical tests so far.

1) On 2009 H1N1 (swine flu) it performed correctly, not "ringing" in the context of a stock market that just went up all year long.

2) On 2014 Ebola, it performed correctly, not "ringing" in the context of a stock market that seemed at the time to be rumbling, but was in retrospect clearly just climbing upwards.

Trigger to investigate

Some threshold for investigating whether to ring the alarm bell is necessary. We can't be constantly scanning the atmosphere for any sign of smoke to signal the next fire. So I want a trigger for when we should bother to look into the threat of pandemic more closely.

Most of us at least casually browse the news. Making the trigger news-linked seems sensible.

The first COVID article in the New York Times was from Jan. 8th, "China Identifies New Virus Causing Pneumonialike Illness." It was on page A13. Several stories were published in the ensuing weeks. The first article on page A1 was "The Test a Deadly Coronavirus Outbreak Poses to China’s Leadership," on January 21st, a month before the stock market crashed.

A headline article in a major newspaper seems like a good candidate as a trigger to investigate using the method I'll explain below.

A simple model of pandemic risk

I created a four-factor model to evaluate pandemic risk. The factors are transmissibility, harm, spread, and institutional signals. Each are divided into several subcategories and are presented as questions. I believe each category could have been answered in a strong "yes" days or weeks prior to Feb. 20th, the edge of the stock market crash. Anyone following the n...
Rhythm Stage Setup v3
by jefftk — 2020-04-06T00:30:02.958Z

Since I

last wrote about my rhythm
setup, I've again made a lot of changes! Here's an example that
shows a bunch of what I'm doing now: (youtube)

The biggest thing I've added since the last rollup is a notion of
tempo. I play drums with my feet as usual, and I've written some
simple heuristics (see estimate_tempo())
for identifying the downbeats. Once you know where the downbeat falls
and how often they are, this opens up a lot of possibilities:

French
Canadian feet. The sharp click of the downbeat happens when I tap
my foot, but then the lighter taps on the upbeat and predownbeat can
happen 1/2 and 3/4 of the way through the beat. I used three
samples from the introduction to Nightingale's La Belle Rose on
their Trois
album for the three different sounds. (youtube)

Hi-hat patterns. This is essentially the same as the French
Canadian feet, but the additional beats are on hi-hat instead of foot
taps. A simple version puts the hi-hat just on the upbeat, but it can
also go on each quarter-beat, and the level of intensity can vary as
well.
(youtube)

Bass patterns. Again, the same sort of idea, but played on a
synth bass. These follow the "active note" which is generally the
most recently played left-hand piano note.

(youtube)

I've configured a few different drum kits, and a few different bass
sounds:
(youtube)

These sound best in reel time, though I've added jig time as well:

(youtube)

I normally have everything play straight, but after recording my mandolin playing I
added a mode where the preup and predown beats fall 1/36th late and
the upbeat falls 1/36th early: (youtube)

On their own these will just go until I tell them to stop, but I have
two main ways of adding control. The first way is using the breath
controller to modify the intensity and add interest:

French Canadian feet:

(youtube)

Hi-hat:

(youtube)

Bass:

(youtube)

The second way is using toe
buttons to pause pieces of the sound and bring them back in:

(youtube)

I've also added a new way to control the active note for when I'm
playing mandolin. My V3 footboard has
four pads on the right foot, and if I tell the system what key and
mode I'm in I can then choose between four chords. I've been doing,
left to right:

Major: vi I IV V

Mixolydian: VII I IV V

Minor: V VI VII i

Minor: VII i III IV

(youtube)

Mostly it doesn'...
Conflict vs. mistake in non-zero-sum games
by Nisan — 2020-04-05T22:22:41.374Z

Summary: Whether you behave like a mistake theorist or a conflict theorist may depend more on your negotiating position in a non-zero-sum game than on your worldview.

Disclaimer: I don't really know game theory.

Plot the payoffs in a non-zero-sum two-player game, and you'll get a convex[1] set with the Pareto frontier on the top and right:

You can describe this set with two parameters: The surplus is how close the outcome is to the Pareto frontier, and the allocation tells you how much the outcome favors player 1 versus player 2. In this illustration, the level sets for surplus and allocation are depicted by concentric curves and radial lines, respectively.

It's tempting to decompose the game into two phases: A cooperative phase, where the players coordinate to maximize surplus; and a competitive phase, where the players negotiate how the surplus is allocated.

Of course, in the usual formulation, both phases occur simultaneously. But this suggests a couple of negotiation strategies where you try to make one phase happen before the other:

"Let's agree to maximize surplus. Once we agree to that, we can talk about allocation."

"Let's agree on an allocation. Once we do that, we can talk about maximizing surplus."

I'm going to provocatively call the first strategy mistake theory, and the second conflict theory.

Indeed, the mistake theory strategy pushes the obviously good plan of making things better off for everyone. It can frame all opposition as making the mistake of leaving surplus on the table.

The conflict theory strategy threatens to destroy surplus in order to get a more favorable allocation. Its narrative emphasizes the fact that the players can't maximize their rewards simultaneously.

Now I don't have a good model of negotiation. But intuitively, it seems that mistake theory is a good strategy if you think you'll be in a better negotiating position once you move to the Pareto frontier. And conflict theory is a good strategy if you think you'll be in a worse negotiating position at the Pareto frontier.

If you're naturally a mistake theorist, this might make conflict theory seem more appealing. Imagine negotiating with a paperclip maximizer over the fate of billions of lives. Mutual cooperation is Pareto efficient, but unappealing. It's more sensible to threaten defection in order to save a few more human lives, if you can get away with it.

It also makes mist

...
Truth value as magnitude of predictions
by George3d6 — 2020-04-05T21:57:01.128Z
Link: https://blog.cerebralab.com/Truth_value_as_magnitude_of_predictions

The best way to discern truths from lies is to see if they have a probability and a margin of error attached to them.

The second best way to do so is to ask when the people holding those potential truths were able to bring them to bear to alter the course of the world.

Once you get past the silly phenomenological and metaphysical layers (i.e. “Do chairs exist ?" Style questions) the problem of truth becomes rather interesting.

In that “truth”, as we commonly use it, will always be dependent on the context, the individual thinking or saying it and the inherent errors in the ways we determine it.

Sometimes (usually) we consider the errors or the probability of it being “true” as being negligible, other times we go to great lengths to determine them.

When looking at a chair it’s rather obvious that the mental map we have for any given chair will differ between individuals. If two people were to strive towards perfectly describing a chair there might be some amount of difference between their description, but the difference would be of no consequence. Thus, we don’t ascribe any error bars to the truth of an object being a chair.

When looking at the data resulting from the collision between some particles, the instruments will have collected certain things that we consider to be truthful insights into the events… and indeed, one could argue they differ much less than the mental pictures two individuals have of a given chair.

However, we still try our best to determine the potential errors our instruments might induce and account for them, thus attaching a margin of error and a probability to the observation, because even minute errors in particle physics are going to be much more consequential than even glaring errors in two individual’s conception of a chair.

That’s also why discussions around gathering and interpreting data from particle accelerators is a much more pertinent subject than a discussion between a myope and a hyperope regarding their mental image of a chair. In a way both of these discussions involve truth claims, but the former is a “truth” that’s worth defining more clearly. I would argue that, the very reason why we might feel like this is so, is how we can end up creating a better definition for its truth value.

But I digress, let&#...
What is the impact of varying infectious dose of COVID-19?
by Elizabeth — 2020-04-05T21:40:01.406Z

Zvi Mowshowitz and Robin Hanson have both made pretty provocative proposals around deliberate variolation/low dose exposure to COVID-19, with the goal of reducing total morbidity/mortality and increasing freedom/productivity. Interestingly, the same rough data has led to opposite recommendations:

Hanson believes we should inoculate the young and healthy with the goal of developing enough immune individuals that R0 falls below 1.
Zvi believes that if low viral load is really so much safer, we should inoculate the least healthy first, to ensure they get the lowest initial dose possible.

Meanwhile in the April Coronavirus Open Thread, Matthew Lewis suggests inoculating via the GI tract, which may lead to weaker symptoms than the same load in the respiratory system.

The wisdom of both of these proposals is really sensitive to exactly how much benefit stems from how much lower the initial dose (or the placement of the initial dose), and the corresponding risks. With that in mind: what do we already know about the impact of varying infectious doses ? What could we learn that would narrow the confidence intervals? How could we learn more?
What is the maximum number of COVID-19 tests which could be performed until the end of the year?
by Roko Jelavić — 2020-04-05T19:19:40.585Z

When it comes to testing capability, something has to be the bottleneck, perhaps reagents. What is the theoretical limit for the number of tests? Can tests be recycled?

If we reduce the number of covid cases to a low count using a quarantine, we will need tests in order to keep the number low. In case we run out of tests, the virus will spread all over the place again, since we would not be able to implement contact tracing.
Seeking opinions on the pros and cons of various telepresence tools
by mingyuan — 2020-04-05T18:22:51.775Z

In this weird new age of social distancing, everyone is scrambling to figure out how to continue working and having a social life over the internet. There are a lot of platforms and tools out there, and it's hard to know which to choose. This has already been the subject of some discussion on LW. There's a Wikipedia article that compares the offerings of different web conferencing software, and plenty of listicles claiming to rank the best ones, but even after reading those, I don't feel like I have a grasp on the landscape.

So I'm seeking contributions to a publicly editable Google Doc where people can give their subjective impressions of the tools they have personal experience with. You can read and contribute here.

I’ve made a general outline, but I only have personal experience with a few of the tools, so I was only able to flesh out a few parts. I'd really appreciate anything you can add - whether it's anecdotes, hard data, or just cursory bullet points. Feel free to also make organization changes or add new platforms to the list. The eventual goal would be to publish on LW; if I can get enough contributions to make this worth publishing, I'd probably also include a table with important stats like limits on call participants, bandwidth (or whatever the relevant thing is there, I'm not a programmer), pricing, etc. Let me know if you have questions!
Hydroxychloroquine: the day science stopped
by Filipe Marchesini — 2020-04-05T18:09:58.290Z

This is a translation of (what I consider the most important bits) part (32%) of the original article "Hidroxicloroquina: o dia em que a ciência parou" from Luis Cláudio Correia, posted on Evidence Based Medicine Blog, 20th March 2020. Please correct mispellings, any English mistakes should be attributed to my translation, not to Luis Claudio Correia. (There are no good translators from Portuguese to English, or vice-versa, up to date, except DeepL. Google Translator does terrible job. Most of the time I use DeepL.com and manually correct mistaken translations). Let me know if you want me to translate the whole article. I also would like to know if there exist a LessWrong Discord.

[...]

The French Article
This article is a bias cluster. But it's not just classic biases, there are conducts that aren't even on the traditional checklists. Something caricatured. Twenty-six patients used hydroxychloroquine versus 16 control patients. A hospital in Marseille recruited patients for treatment and other centers in other regions recruited the controls. The outcome was a substitute: the virologic negation of the nasal swab on the sixth day.

At day6 post-inclusion, 70% of hydroxychloroquine-treated patients were virologicaly cured comparing with 12.5% in the control group (p= 0.001).

First, confusion bias. Randomization would serve to avoid confusion bias, which did not occur. But this study goes further, it causes confusion bias. Not preventing is not the same as causing it.

The unusual: patients in Marseille who refused treatment continued in the study as a control group! This causes great basal heterogeneity between the groups, because patients who refuse are different from patients who accept. When refusing a treatment, the patients should not be included in the study. In fact, in a clinical trial, potential volunteers do not refuse treatment. What they refuse is to enter the trial.

Following the pattern of irrationality, patients who met exclusion criteria (comorbidities, contraindications to the drug) were included in the study as a control group. More severe patients, previously in the drug group, were transferred to the control group.

Second, the study excludes from the treatment group patients who did not complete the treatment, in a gross violation of the 'intention to treat' principle. Inadequately they call this "...
What messy problems do you see Deep Reinforcement Learning applicable to?
by Riccardo Volpato — 2020-04-05T17:43:45.945Z

Many consider Deep Reinforcement Learning (DeepRL) systems, such as AlhpaZero or MuZero, as the most-likely early version of AGI systems.

However, a common critique to RL systems is that they are applicable only to well-defined problems, such as games.

Hence, a natural question that follow from this is: what "messy" problems could be tackled using DeepRL systems?

Here I intend messy as a pseudo-definition of problems that do not have clearly identifiable inputs and outputs. Examples that come to my mind are generally problems from Economics, Management and Policy Making.
What to draw from Macintyre et al 2015?
by ChristianKl — 2020-04-05T16:56:18.734Z

Last week it seems the West decided that we should all wear masks and wear cloth masks if we don't have proper masks.

As Scott Alexander pointed out, Macintyre et al 2015 seems to be a only controlled trial of cloth masks and it writes:

For example, a contaminated cloth mask may transfer pathogen from the mask to the bare hands of the wearer. We also showed that ﬁltration was extremely poor (almost 0%) for the cloth masks. Observations during SARS suggested double-masking and other practices increased the risk of infection because of moisture, liquid diffusion and pathogen retention. These effects may be associated with cloth masks.

I'm not on record for being the biggest fan of evidence-based medicine, but getting everybody to take use a medical intervention based on pathotheoretical reasoning when the paper that provides out best evidence cautions against that intervention is risky.

Why does Macintyre et al 2015 come to so different conclusion about the ability of cloth masks to filter then other studies?

What action could people take to reduce the potential increase risk that Macintyre sees when they don't have better masks?
How strong is the evidence for hydroxychloroquine?
by Chris_Leong — 2020-04-05T09:32:00.058Z

There has been a lot of discussion of hydroxychloroquine (see the megathread on Effective Altruism Coronavirus Discussion, note you need to answer two questions to gain access). Doctors treating COVID-19 have rated hydroxychloroquine the most effective drug based on their experience. But on the other hand, results have been mixed with a recent RCT showing no effect.

At this stage how strong is the evidence for hydroxychloroquine and if it works, how effective does it appear to be as a treatment?

Disclaimer: Please seek medical advice before taking any substance, particularly those like hydroxychloroquine that have known side effects.
Life as metaphor for everything else.
by Charlie Steiner — 2020-04-05T07:21:11.303Z

Life is highly instructive.

Not my own, personal, human life - that's kind of a mess right now. I mean life as in the property shared by all living things. The "are viruses alive?" kind of life.

Life is really, really, useful. As a metaphor. Because its associated philosophical problems have been more or less dispatched, and this provides a model for how many other conundrums are going to probably, inevitably go.

To recap: What's the problem with life?

Did you know that Louis Pasteur was a proponent of vitalism? Yes, the same Pasteur who got a glassblower to make him a swan-neck flask so he could show that it was particles in the air, not air itself, that caused broth to ferment. He was convinced that fermentation was such an idiosyncratic marker of life that it was not reducible to ordinary chemistry.

Pasteur was not a dumb guy, and he didn't live all that long ago. This is important: Pasteur was not violating modern norms of thought. The way Pasteur thought about life is so compatible with modernity that we still use this way of thinking ourselves for other topics.

To Pasteur, living things had some hypothetical special property (the essence of life... itself). Things either had the special property or they didn't - if they didn't they were just boring nonliving matter, but if they had the special property then by virtue of this single property they could do diverse things like ferment broth, or synthesize urea, or reproduce themselves.

This is a very easy and natural way for people to think about life (certainly it was common among the ancient Greeks). Why? Because it's simply the prediction that our mental categories match up with the natural categories of the world. We mentally separate things into living and nonliving, and we have different habits of thought depending on this categorization. It would be so convenient if the world also separated things cleanly into living and nonliving, with different rules for each.

This easy logic works great for everyday cases - things in different mental categories will pretty reliably follow different everyday patterns. Pasteur's mistake was trying to substitute in "universal laws" for "everyday patterns." You show me someone advanced enough to think about the work in terms of laws, and I'll show you someone advanced enough to invent vitalism.

So what hap...
Partying over Internet: Technological Aspects
by Martin Sustrik — 2020-04-05T06:20:01.067Z

Now, with billion people locked down in their homes, social contact over Internet becomes an increasingly important topic. Not only it allows people to stay in touch, it also lowers the incentives to leave one's home and meet people in person and thus contributes to the public health.

I threw an online birthday party few days ago and in this article I would like to share some of my observations about how a party over Internet differs from one in the physical world and point out some implications and possible improvements for videoconferencing software.

To start with, existing videoconferencing software is geared towards business meetings. And the differences between a business meeting and a party are easy to spot: At a party, there's much less structure. While at a meeting it's typically just one person that speaks and everybody else listens, at a party people tend to speak in parallel. At a party, non-verbal communication (facial expressions, gestures) is crucial. At a business meeting, not so much. At a meeting one wants to maintain self-control. At a party, one often rather wants to get rid of it. And so on and so forth.

So, let's move directly to my observations:

Everyone should be visible

Unlike with Google Hangouts where the person speaking is displayed in full-screen view and everyone else as a small icon on the side, at a party a want to see everyone in parallel. Sometimes, it's someone's non-verbal accompaniment of someone else's speech that's the real fun. But even when that's not the case, I still want to follow how everyone reacts to what is being said, whether they are laughing, paying attention, not paying attention, preparing a snack, drinking, smoking or whether they have left for a moment, leaving just a lonely chair visible in the window.

In short, I want to see all the participants of the party, side by side, all of them in equally sized windows. Size of the window is too expensive a piece of psychological real estate to waste on such an obvious thing as "who's speaking at the moment". More about that below.

Looking at people

Maybe the most unpleasant part of social videoconferencing is not being able to follow who's looking at whom. Everyone just stares, indiscriminately, at the camera.

I have no idea of how reliably the existing eye-tracking software works. After browsing the web for a minute it seems that eye tracking is used mostly fo

...