trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Questions about Stocker's DIY vaccine
by dawangy — 2021-12-29T22:44:47.377Z

I'll quote a snippet from user fluffyclouds on johnswentworth's original "Making Vaccine" post:

"There is another Covid-19 peptide vaccine developed by a Dr. Winfried Stöcker. He injected it into ≥64 volunteers, and the results he published look promising. They show both a good level of IgA, IgG and IgM antibodies and ≥ 94% neutralization for the vast majority of the test subjects. According to him (last paragraph of his blog post), none of the test subjects have reported any relevant adverse symptoms.

He describes the manufacturing in his blog (see translation below):

Man nehme dreimal 15 Mikrogramm rekombinante RBD der S1-Untereinheit (Arg319-Phe541) für eine Person. Als Adiuvans habe ich Alhydrogel von InvivoGen verwendet: Ordentlich durchschütteln und davon 200 Mikroliter mit der Tuberkulinspritze aufziehen. In eine größere Spritze 10 Milliliter Kochsalz aufziehen und die 200 Mikroliter dazugeben, mischen. Davon 500 Mikroliter pro Schuss, mit denen man seine Portion Antigen vermischt. Alles hübsch steril.

I've attempted a translation and added some of my own understanding in [square brackets]. Though I'm a German native speaker, I have zero domain knowledge in this field, so please correct me if anything is wrong:

Take three times 15 μg [three doses of 15 μg per person, spaced days apart - see result data linked above for timing] recombinant RBD in the S1 subunit (Arg319-Phe541) for one person. As an adjuvant I used Alhydrogel by InvivoGen: shake thoroughly and then draw 200 μl with a tuberculin syringe. Using a larger syringe, draw 10 ml saline solution and add the 200 μl [of adjuvant], then mix. Of this mix, use 500 μl per shot and mix it with the antigen [the 15 μg recombinant RBD]. Do all this in a sterile way.

If (!) these instructions are exhaustive, it might be easier, though possibly more expensive to produce than RaDVaC. Googling Arg319-Phe541 suggests that 100 μg (6 doses) / 1000 μg (66 doses) of this RBD can be bought for 310 € (52 € per dose) / 1130 € (18 € per dose), though there may be cheaper offers. I have no clue if the Arg319-Phe541 RBD I found here (230-01102-1000-RB listed on biocat.com and raybiotech.com) would be of the right kind to use in a vaccine.

If you have the relevant domain knowledge to evaluate how complete these instructions are or what other risks and benefits compared to RaDVaC this vaccine may have, I'd really appr

...
Increased Availability and Willingness for Deployment of Resources for Effective Altruism and Long-Termism
by Evan_Gaensbauer — 2021-12-29T20:30:24.992Z

In the last few months, there have been several indicators of a dramatic increase of resources available from a number of organizations in effective altruism, in particular for the focus area of EA community/infrastructure building and long-termism.

This includes not only financial resources for typical grant-making but also for research fellowships and scholarships from newer funding sources, as well as different kinds of institutional support and career opportunities.

This list isn't a call for applications or requests at this time from any of the organizations in question. This is only a summary of recent developments so the EA community at large is aware of these opportunities and changes for the purpose of strategic decision-making.

Benjamin Todd, CEO of 80,000 Hours, made the case for why EA needs 'mega-projects' i.e., projects that can deploy up to $100 million per year.
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) has dramatically grown in the last year, nearly doubling in staff.
Rethink Priorities has also doubled their team and is looking to expand further.
The EA Infrastructure Fund expects the total that will be granted in 2021 will exceed $5 million, more than 2.7x the total granted in 2020, and 1.3x has awarded in all previous years (2018-2020) combined, and that they expect to be able to make these funding needs.
The Survival and Flourishing Fund deployed approximately $19 million in 2021 vs. $5.4 million in 2020.
Vitalik Buterin, founder of the blockchain platform Ethereum, donated $25 million to the Future of Life Institute to support research activities such as Ph.D. scholarships.
Lightcone Infrastructure, now the parent organization for rationality community blog LessWrong, is now hiring new staff with salaries of $150-200 thousand dollars.
The Effective Altruism Forum recently held a creative writing contest that rewarded $20 thousand total the winners.
AI safety and research company Anthropic has raised $124 million in a Series A funding round.
Community member Sam Bankman-Fried is now the richest person under 30 and the cryptocurrency exchange he founded, FTX, is now offering EA fellowships.
The CEA is launching Campus Centers at top universities and is expecting some of these centers to be spending millions of dollars per year within the next few years. Beyond this, local groups funding is becoming much more accessible from either the CEA or

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COVID Skepticism Isn't About Science
by jaspax — 2021-12-29T17:53:43.354Z

You live in a roughly Dunbar-sized group. This does not mean that you live in a small village, but it does mean that your actual personal contacts, the number of people that you have direct social contact with, is about one hundred. One day, a respiratory illness starts to circulate among your social group. At first it seems just like a bad cold; later it becomes clear that it's a really bad cold.

You catch it, and you spend four days in bed with fever, muscle aches, chills, and nausea. Your sense of taste and smell go away. Once the fever breaks and you get out of bed, you deal with another week of sinus headaches and persistent dry cough. This is way longer than a typical cold, but it does eventually abate, and you get back to your normal life. [1]

In the aftermath, you take stock with your friends and acquaintances. It seems that about half of everyone you knew got the supercold; the rest avoided it by good luck or had such mild cases that they didn't notice. One person had a fever for ten days and almost had to go to the hospital, but they did eventually recover.

Nobody that you know died, though you did hear about a friend's elderly great-uncle who caught the cold and died of complications.

One day shortly after this, a mysterious man in a gray suit approaches you.

"I see that you and your friends have survived the passing of the great and terrible novel respiratory virus," he says.

"Uh, yes," you said, wondering why he refers to it in such an obtuse manner. "Who are you?"

"I am a concerned bureaucrat," the man says. "It also so happens that I am in possession of a time-travel device."

"Whoah, what? How does that work?"

"Never mind that. The point is: I can make it so that your friends do not suffer from the supercold."

"Okay. What's the catch?" You are genre-savvy and know that there is always a catch.

"Well, you'll have to close down many of your businesses for several months."

"Okay... so how will my friends who are waiters or small business owners avoid bankruptcy??"

The man shrugs. "We'll send them a check for a few thousand dollars."

"That's not nearly---"

The man cuts you off. "Also you'll have to give up in-person socializing for the same period. Especially you have to stop big social events like church and synagogue meetings, holiday parties, and weddings."

"But my sister is getting married---"

"And you will be required to wear uncomfortable masks whenever you...
What are the pros and cons of seeking a formal diagnosis of autism?
by Dumbledore's Army — 2021-12-29T16:52:05.636Z

I suspect myself to be borderline autistic, and while I can function in society, I might have a diagnosable condition. (More details below.) Is it in my interest to seek diagnosis? I believe many viewers and commenters on this site are in similar situations, so I hope that this question will be useful to others and not just to me. I've listed some of the pros and cons I can think of below, but I'm probably missing some.

Pros:

A formal diagnosis means you can ask for special consideration and usually get it, even if you don't strictly need it. For example, accommodations to make a work environment less distracting. If I'm undiagnosed and just find things irritating, I have to put up with them. (Not so relevant for me, but students may be able to get more time on exams which is a big advantage.)

Many people seem to find a formal diagnosis helpful for understanding themselves (are there advantages over a self-diagnosis?) and for explaining themselves to others.

Cons:

Are there circumstances where having a formal diagnosis could make me more vulnerable to being stigmatized or labeled? For example, if I were to suffer a different medical condition and be admitted to hospital, will the doctors/nurses treat me like an idiot because I have 'autistic' on my medical records? Relatedly, if I get dementia when I'm old, will I be infantilised and treated as lacking capacity at a much earlier stage than non-autistics because of the pre-existing autism diagnosis?

I could just explain to people that eg I don't like last-minute changes of plans. Is there an advantage to explaining to other people that it's because I'm autistic, rather than just saying it's part of my personality?

Is it socially responsible to seek diagnosis for borderline cases? There's an argument that the modern world is far too quick to pathologise behaviour that is only slightly different from normal. Should I avoid contributing to this trend?

Personal details: I have difficulty making friends and have gone through periods of my life where I had no friends. I was bullied at school for being obviously different from other children. I think analytically and respond to ideas more than personalities. I found LessWrong's explanation of non-autistic behaviour to be very helpful: what was sometimes baffling is now explained by status-seeking and signalling. I personally seem to lack most o...
CDC Changes Isolation Guidelines
by Zvi — 2021-12-29T16:40:01.759Z

The CDC has changed its isolation guidelines.

Previously, if you tested positive for Covid, you needed to isolate for ten days. Now you only need to isolate for five. The official announcement is here.

Read-through first, with my reactions, then reactions from others.

Given what we currently know about COVID-19 and the Omicron variant, CDC is shortening the recommended time for isolation from 10 days for people with COVID-19 to 5 days, if asymptomatic, followed by 5 days of wearing a mask when around others. The change is motivated by science demonstrating that the majority of SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurs early in the course of illness, generally in the 1-2 days prior to onset of symptoms and the 2-3 days after. Therefore, people who test positive should isolate for 5 days and, if asymptomatic at that time, they may leave isolation if they can continue to mask for 5 days to minimize the risk of infecting others.

I mean, bullshit. This is most definitely not motivated primarily by science demonstrating a distribution of transmission. If it was, the guidelines would have changed when they learned about this, rather than exactly when the guidelines otherwise needed to change. Due to what else we know about Omicron.

What we know about the Omicron variant is that it is everywhere and spreading fast. What we know is that lots of people are getting sick at once. If we forced them to isolate for ten days, there wouldn’t be anyone to staff the hospitals, man the checkout counters, drive the trucks and fly the planes. To erase any remaining doubt, The Washington Post confirms this was the motivation.

So in the interest of making sure people could do those things, we’re shortening the period to five days. Understandable? Definitely. I can’t argue with it. I’m all for ‘following the economics.’ The isolation guidelines didn’t match the reality on the ground. They had to change to match reality.

But every time you say you are ‘following the science’ when you’re transparently not doing that on any level, you’re burning your credibility and the commons that much more. It needs to stop.

Timing things to the positive test rather than to the onset of symptoms or to the exposure makes sense, since it’s the only objective measurement to go by. That can’t really change. It’s interesting that this creates an extra incentive to test positive quickly if you’re going to test positive at a...
Missing Mental Models
by silentbob — 2021-12-29T14:08:34.990Z

I have a vague idea about two things I'd like to turn into a proper term / concept / mental model, and be able to communicate them better to others. I don't know if there are already common terms for these. The first one is just a standard "thing I have encountered a few times and would like to have a word for". The second one is the meta thing of "not having a word for something while being sure that there is or should be a name for it".

#1 Judging the viability of rules, based on cherry-picked implications

This is the thing I observed a few times recently and wish I had a proper way of naming / explaining it, that is more compressed and easier to understand than just listing a bunch of examples.

A bunch of examples:

There a quite a few Covid related regulations in my country, that (expectedly) sometimes lead to weird instances. E.g. family A, B and C are not allowed to meet all at once, but it's fine if A meets B, A meets C and B meets C separately all on the same day. Just looking at these scenarios it seems evident that them just meeting all at once would not be worse then meeting one after another on the same day, so it's easy to conclude that the underlying rule must be stupid.
I sometimes heard of cases where a university student didn't get financial support from the state because the parents earned just barely too much (because financial support is only granted up to a certain threshold of parental income). It's very easy to point to these and say "see, if the parents had just earned 20€ less per month, they would have been better off! Isn't that crazy? What a stupid rule!"
Another case of which I'm not sure whether it really points towards the same mental model, or this is actually an entirely separate issue: car manufacturers often hide features behind software locks; i.e. the car is capable of a whole bunch of things, but you need to pay good money in order to unlock them. An extreme case of this is some Tesla cars that came in short and long range version, both using the identical battery, with the short range ones being purely software-restricted. Here too it's easy to point to this situation from the perspective of a consumer who bought the short range version, and conclude "they should just unlock the long range version for me, it's pervese to keep it locked artificially".

In all these cases, looking at the thing we're observing in isolation can lead...
Does Braess's paradox show up in markets?
by TekhneMakre — 2021-12-29T12:09:18.761Z

Braess's paradox shows that in some cases, adding roads can make everyone's commute longer. (Pause here if you want to figure out on your own how that might be possible. The general situation is that everyone just tries to find the route that's quickest for them personally; and some roads take longer the more cars are on them.)
Roughly, an example of the paradox is as follows: everyone wants to get from one place to another place. There are two routes: road B followed by road B', and road C followed by road C'. Roads B and C' take a long time, which doesn't depend much on how many cars are there. Roads B' and C take a short time, given the current number of cars, but they take signficantly longer the more cars are there. Now, say you add a road D which is very short and connects the end of C to the beginning of B'. Since C, D, and B' take a short time, lots more cars take the new route C-D-B' rather than the old B-B' or C-C'. For some traffic-to-drive-time curves, the equilibrium of this ends up being that *everyone's* drive takes longer than before D was opened. (See wikipedia for details.)
What's even going on? We can rephrase the situation like this: each driver is presented with a choice. They can either take their old route, or they can take the new C-D-B' route, which is faster than their old route but causes everyone else a slightly longer drive. (I think for some settings of the numbers, this would be a sort of many-player Prisoner's Dilemma.) We could say, there's an unpriced externality of driving on C or B': you clog up the roads. If everyone disregards the externality, everyone ends up worse off.
This all seems like it should happen in lots of different contexts. Really, anything with lots of agents taking multiple pathways, some of which induce externalities. Wikipedia gives some examples, but doesn't give examples of this occurring in economic markets. So my question: are there examples of Braess's paradox in markets? In other words, are the examples where introducing a new good/service could make things broadly worse because of externalities from "overloading pathways"? Are there really big examples or ubiquitous classes of examples?
I'm not sure it's joint-carving to talk about Braess's paradox as separate from just externalities. The thing I have in mind is something like, specifically the externalities from raising the price on a good/service ...
What would you like from Microcovid.org? How valuable would it be to you?
by Elizabeth — 2021-12-29T04:42:01.675Z

Microcovid.org was a vital tool to many of us during the pandemic- I made

a whole speech

about it back at summer solstice. The back and forth over how finished covid is, plus a dependence entirely on volunteers, has pushed microcovid into something of a limbo. It's not clear what the best next step for it is. One option would be to update microcovid for new problems, but that’s a lot of work and I have a lot of uncertainty about how valuable any given improvement is. So I’d to collect some data.

How are you using microcovid now?
What is the minimum viable change that would create value for you, and what would that value be? The more explicit the better here- comments like “feature X would be worth $n to me” or “it enabled me to find a collaborated then enabled a project” are more useful than “I like it a lot”
What’s your dream microcovid, and what value would that create for you?
Anything else you’d like to share on this topic?

I’ve asked LW to enable the experimental agree/disagree feature for this post. The benefit of this is that you can boost particular data points without writing anything. The risk is that an individual's preferences get counted repeatedly: 5 people with the same opinion who write five posts and agree with all of the others’ identical points should be counted as 5 people, not 25. So I ask that you:

Not agree with comments substantially overlapping with a comment you write
If multiple comments make the same point, only click agree for one of them

This isn’t an exact science because comments will sometimes contain more than one point or make very similar but not totally identical points, but please do your best.
Should I blog on LessWrong?
by maria_a — 2021-12-28T22:25:08.596Z

This is my first post here. I would like feedback on my decision of signing up to LessWrong with the idea of writing here occasionally. I explain my reasoning below, but first, for context, here is a brief intro about me:

I am not sure if I consider myself a rationalist or part of the rationality community, but I enjoy scrolling through LW and reading some posts. I do consider myself part of the Effective Altruism community and have been involved in it for over two years. I'm a graduate student in one of the 80,000 Hours priority cause areas and my aim is to be a researcher, perhaps also involved with policy, in such area.

I have a website where I used to blog about anything I found interesting. Since I applied to graduate school, it has become a professional/academic website (I removed most of my existing posts) and I intend to keep it that way (with occasional academic posts). I enjoy writing and I recognize it's a very useful skill to develop. However, I'm concerned that having several posts on my professional website about EA or Rationality would cause a negative impression on academics or future employers who visit my website.

I have not included my surname on my LW username for the same reasons (my LW user does not show up on a google search of my full name). I do not want complete anonymity: I expect that most of the people who know me will identify me as the person behind this LW profile and that those reading this LW profile may find my website. I'm okay with both.
Does my reasoning seem reasonable? A few final thoughts:

I expect I would cross-post some posts from here on my blog, and vice-versa.
I have also created a profile on the EA Forum with the same username (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/maria_a) to use in a similar fashion (but I expect to post on LW more frequently due to its broader content scope).
I can always link to my LW account on the first page of my website should I want to (effectively becoming fully public), and even re-posting there (some of) my LW posts.
A non-magical explanation of Jeffrey Epstein
by lc — 2021-12-28T21:15:41.953Z

On some level, in order to understand the society they live in, most people have to be conspiracy theorists. Forming correct conspiracy theories is a critical and essential part of understanding politics, international relations, and the justice system. Genuine conspiracies between people are a fact of living in an industrialized, highly populated globe. There are actual intelligence organizations, law enforcement agencies, insurrectionist militias, and organized criminal enterprises which by their nature create secrets, and clandestinely plan murders and arrests. We don't generally regard them as spectacular, because you can read about most of the important (and publicly disclosed) ones on Wikipedia.

Clearly, then, there are key differences between the regular conspiracy theorist, which almost all of us are, and the cultural conception of a "conspiracy theorist". One common difference is an implausible level of sophistication and ability assigned to the schemers. When working in their near lives, people have an intuition about how many people can be told about something salacious without it becoming public knowledge. Even in circumstances where everyone is properly motivated and there are low rewards for becoming an informant, like a middle school classroom, we understand intuitively how hard it is to keep everyone from leaking information to the teacher. The airquoted "conspiracy theorist" first and foremost rejects their internal social navigation sensors. Instead, in order to make their ideas plausible, they tend to see intelligence officers who are really just bigger LARPers than the "conspiracy theorist" as supernaturally competent and cooperative within their in-group.

A second thing the "conspiracy theorist" will do is assign demonic or otherworldly values to large groups of people, lacking any backstory for why they seem to have these strange motivations. Now, in real life, people can have very strange reasons for their actions. I find it hard to imagine that it'd be possible to successfully gather nineteen people for the 9/11 terror attacks, and end up without a single person who'd object and alert the FBI. But that's just a failure of my own imagination. There is a huge amount of indoctrination, socialization, and child rearing before someone is entrusted with a task like driving a plane into the pentagon - and on top of it the 9/11 hijackers were b...