trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
I Caught Covid And All I Got Was This Lousy Ambiguous Data
by Elizabeth — 2022-04-21T19:30:05.403Z

Tl;dr I tried to run an n of 1 study on niacin and covid, and it failed to confirm or disprove anything at all.

You may remember that back in October I published a very long post investigating a niacin-based treatment protocol for long covid. My overall conclusion was “seems promising but not a slam dunk; I expect more rigorous investigation to show nothing but we should definitely check”.

Well recently I got covid and had run out of more productive things I was capable of doing, so decided to test the niacin theory. I learned nothing but it was a lot of effort and I deserve a blog post out of it null results are still results so I’m sharing anyway.

Background On Niacin

Niacin is a B-vitamin used in a ton of metabolic processes. If you’re really curious, I describe it in excruciating detail in the original post.

All B vitamins are water-soluble, and it is generaly believed that unless you take unbelievably stupid doses you will pee out any excess intake without noticing. It’s much harder to build up stores of water-soluble vitamins than fat vitamins, so you need a more regular supply. Niacin is a little weird among the water-solubles in that it gives very obvious signs of overdose: called flush, the symptoms consist of itchy skin and feeling overheated. Large doses can lead to uncontrolled shaking, but why would you ever take that much, when it’s so easy to avoid?

People regularly report response patterns that sure look like their body has a store of niacin that can be depleted and refilled over time. A dose someone has been taking for weeks or months will suddenly start giving them flush, and if they don’t lower it the flush symptoms will get worse and worse.

Some forms of niacin don’t produce flush. Open question if those offer the same benefits with no side effects, offer fewer benefits, or are completely useless.

Niacin And Long Covid

There’s an elaborate hypothesis about how covid depletes niacin (and downstream products), and this is a contributor to long covid. My full analysis is here. As of last year I hadn’t had covid (this is antibody test confirmed, I definitely didn’t have an asymptomatic case) but I did have lingering symptoms from my vaccine and not a lot else to try, so I gave the protocol a shot.

My experience was pretty consistent with the niacin-storage theory. I spent a long time at quite a high dose of the form of niacin the pro...
Are smart people's personal experiences biased against general intelligence?
by tailcalled — 2022-04-21T19:25:26.603Z

TL;DR: Collider between g and valued traits in anecdotal experiences.

IQ tests measure the g factor - that is, mental traits and skills that are useful across a wide variety of cognitive tasks. g appears to be important for a number of outcomes, particularly socioeconomic outcomes like education, job performance and income. g is often equated with intelligence.

I believe that smart people's personal experiences are biased against the g factor. That is, I think that people who are high in g will tend to see things in their everyday life that suggest to them that there is a tradeoff between being high g and having other valuable traits.

An example

A while ago, Nassim Taleb published the article IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle. In it, he makes a number of bad and misleading arguments against IQ tests, most of which I'm not going to address. But one argument stood out to me: He claims that IQ tests only tap into abilities that are suitable for academic problems, and that they in particular are much less effective when dealing with problems that have long tails of big losses and/or big gains.

Essentially, Taleb insists that g is useless "in the real world", especially for high-risk/high-reward situations. It is unsurprising that he would care a lot about this, because long tails are the main thing Taleb is known for.[1]

In a way, it might seem intuitive that there's something to Taleb's claims about g - there is, after all, no free lunch in intelligence, so it seems like any skill would require some sort of tradeoff, and ill-defined risks seem like a logical tradeoff for performance at well-defined tasks. However, the fundamental problem with this argument is that it's wrong. Nassim Taleb does not provide any evidence, but generally studies on IQ don't find g to worsen performance, and tend to find it to improve performance, including on complex, long tail-heavy tasks like stock trading.[2]

But what I've realized is that there might be a charitable interpretation for Taleb's argument. Specifically, we have good reason to believe that his claim is a reflection of his personal experience and observations in life. Let's take a look:

Who is Nassim Taleb?

Nassim Taleb used stock trading methods that were particularly suited to long tail scenarios to become financially independent. With his bounty of free time, he's written several books about randomness and long tails...
My Terrible Experience with Terror
by monkymind — 2022-04-21T17:58:36.391Z

I hope to start a meaningful conversation around the suffering many of us experience as a result of our mental illnesses.

You shouldn't read this if you're currently struggling with panic attacks so much that a detailed narrative of my panic attacks will trigger them.

I don’t enjoy talking about my suffering publicly, but I feel courageous enough to share it here, because:

I’ve been impressed by LessWrong’s culture of kindness and respect.
I hope I can help or comfort at least one person who is also afflicted by mental illness.

I don’t want your pity, but I want your love.

I don’t want your agreement, but I want your respect.

With that said,

My crippling anxiety and resulting panic attacks are by far (second place is not visible on the graph) the most difficult thing I’ve ever been through.

I had my first panic attack on January 1st of 2021.

It felt like walking down the street on a stormy day and randomly getting punched in the face by Mike Tyson. I say stormy because in hindsight I had not been taking good care of my physical or mental health, and the signs were there.

My first panic attack was awful, and insidious, and hope crushing.

My second panic attack was more awful, and more insidious, and more hope crushing.

I don’t know how many panic attacks I experienced in the first two days. They blended into each other, and the high levels of anxiety I experienced in the anticipation of the next inevitable panic attack certainly didn’t help.

I call them panic attacks now, but for the first several days I had no idea what was happening to me.

I only knew terror. I only knew that my skin felt like it was burning. I only knew that I was fighting to breathe.

You know that feeling when you realize things aren’t going to be the same? I had only experienced a similar pit in my stomach when an awful thing had happened.

I felt like an animal trapped in a cave. There was a raging fire at the entrance, and that made me really afraid.

How could I escape?

I desperately wished I could feel better. I wished I could escape to somewhere calmer and brighter, maybe something permanent.

I vividly remember not being able to sleep those first two days. My God, my heart goes out to those of you who struggle with insomnia.

Before this experience I was not aware of how effective sleep is at healing your mind.

I was u...
THE GOLDEN RULE; What can we learn from it?
by Rami Rustom — 2022-04-21T16:38:40.288Z

The golden rule says to treat others as you want to be treated. This principle is about teaching people to have integrity when interacting with others. It's trying to get us to imagine ourselves in someone else's shoes in an attempt to better understand their perspective. If you wouldn't like to be yelled at, then you shouldn't do that to others.

But the golden rule on it's own isn't enough. It's just a rule of thumb, and like all rules of thumb there are exceptions to the rule. The point is that you shouldn't try to follow this rule by the letter and instead you should follow it in spirit. The spirit of the rule is about avoiding being a hypocrite and learning how to think about things from other people's perspectives. More generally, what's needed in relationships is to find mutually-beneficial ways of interacting with each other - to treat others in ways that are compatible with your preferences and their preferences.

In many cases our preferences are in harmony. But sometimes there's a conflict of preferences. So what should be done in these cases? One option is to leave each other alone, and as long as all parties are ok with that, then the conflict is resolved and everybody is in harmony. The goal there is to avoid hurting each other. It’s a good option to always keep in mind as a last resort. Another option we have is to change our preferences so that we’re still interacting with each other but our preferences are in harmony instead of in conflict. These two options mean that we should maintain a degree of flexibility with our preferences. And this makes sense because we're not perfect; sometimes our preferences deserve improvement.

Our preferences are ideas, and like all ideas, we should apply the principles and methods of reason to them. That means recognizing that whatever our current preferences are now, we should always be aware that they might not be good enough. There’s some conflict that needs to be resolved. And that means there's opportunity to find better preferences to replace our current ones with the goal of finding preferences that result in harmony.

To properly understand reason we must properly understand freedom. They are inherently connected. People need the freedom to think and to act on their thinking, which of course means that one's actions must not infringe on the freedom of others to do the same. If someone forces or coerces you t...
Choice := Anthropics uncertainty? And potential implications for agency
by Antoine de Scorraille — 2022-04-21T16:38:12.068Z

Epistemic status: half-baked thought

When an embedded agent - let's say Emmy - is faced with a choice from a set of actions (Ai)i∈1..n, she is uncertain about what type of decision maker she is in her epistemic position.

For every possible choice Ai among (Ai)i∈1..n Emmy might select, the story would be "it turned out that Emmy is an Ak-er"[1].

If Emmy is able to say confidently "I'm about to act Ak", this means that she has already made her decision (or that she had no choice in the first place, depending on the situation[2]). The choice therefore takes place during the uncertainty phase, when Emmy might say "I'm not sure who I am. Maybe a A6-er, maybe A2-er... Or am I a A8-er?".

So we have an agent, Emmy, without any observation whatsoever about her future decision. My take here this is anthropic situation: each kind of Emmy (A1-er, ..., An-er) is indiscernible before the end of the decision process.

Conclusion:

Anthropics

situation is not a weird LW problem, but the

essence

of any

choice

.

Hope: If valid, this take could help to deconfuse choice, so on agency and optimizer.

^

For instance, faced with the Newcomb problem, she has to turned to be 1-boxer or 2-boxer (at least in a deterministic setup).

^

I think the feeling about choice would be interesting to explore here, my guess is it's about the recent update on identity. If Emmy has known for a long time that she is a certain kind, in such a situation she doesn't feel her action as a choice, because she is already decided to act in a certain way.
Reflections on My Own Missing Mood
by Lone Pine — 2022-04-21T16:19:02.556Z

Life on Earth is incredibly precious. Even a tiny p(DOOM) must be taken very seriously. Since we cannot predict the future, and since in a debate we should be epistemically humble, we should give our interlocutors the benefit of the doubt. Therefore, even if on my inside view p(DOOM) is small, I should act like it is a serious concern. If the world does end up going down in flames (or is converted into a giant ball of nanobots), I would not want to be the idiot who said "that's silly, never gonna happen."

The problem is my emotional state can really only reflect my inside view and my intuitions. To account for the very real probability that I'm wrong and just an idiot, I can agree to consider, for the purposes of discussion, a p(DOOM) of say, 0.25, which is equivalent to billions of people dying in expected value. However, I can't make myself feel like the world is doomed if I don't actually think it is. This is the origin, I think, of missing moods.

For me personally, I have always had an unusually detached grim-o-meter. Even if an unstoppable asteroid were heading to Earth and certainly we all were going to die, I probably would not freak out. I'm just pretty far out on that spectrum of personality. Given that, and given that it makes me a bit reckless in my thinking, I'm very grateful that the world is full of people who do freak out (in appropriate and productive ways) when there is some kind of crisis. Civilization needs some people pointing to problems and fervently making plans to address them, and civilization also (at least occasionally) needs people to say "actually it's going to be okay." Ideally, public consensus will meet in the middle and somewhat close to the truth.

I've had three weeks to reflect on EY's post. That post, along with the general hyper-pessimism around alignment, does piss me off somewhat. I've thought about why this pessimistic mood frustrates me, and I've come up with a few reasons.

Crisis Fatigue

Here is a highly scientific chart of current world crises:

My younger sister is quite pessimistic about climate change. Actually scratch that: it's not climate change that she's worried about, it's biosphere collapse. I'm conflicted in my reaction to her worries. This is strikingly similar to my internal conflict over the alignment crisis. On the one hand, I'm very optimistic about new energy technologies saving the day. On the other han...
Covid 4/21/22: Variants Working Overtime
by Zvi — 2022-04-21T15:10:01.332Z

Earlier this week, a judge overturned the transportation mask mandate, which I covered here. I will also be covering the situation in China in its own post.

No one asked this time around, but a friend recommends this P100 mask if you’re looking to go big rather than go home.

The biggest other news is that Omicron continues to cycle into new variants.

There’s BA.2.1.12, there’s BA.4 and there’s BA.5.
All seem to be more infectious than BA.2.
Which was more infectious than BA.1.
Which was much more infectious than Delta.
Which was more infectious than Alpha.
Which was more infectious than the original strain.

We’ve come a long way. China is still attempting Zero Covid, which I will cover in the China post, but that is looking more and more like state failure to adapt to reality than a reasonable policy choice. Covid-19 is here to stay, at least until we can get a nasal vaccine that prevents transmission, research towards which is not currently something we are even willing to properly fund.

Executive Summary

Moderna booster candidate looks great.
Cases and deaths radically down on paper due to Easter, mostly ignore.
Things increasingly returning to normal, travel mask mandates lifting.
China situation is scary, will be covering that in its own posts.

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Prediction from last week: 250,000 cases (+13%) and 3,900 deaths (-10%).

Results: 231,576 cases (+4%) and 2,402 deaths (-45%!).

Prediction for next week: 277,800 cases (+20%) and 4,100 deaths (+71%!?)

Easter (and perhaps Passover) suppressed cases and somehow even after two years I seem to not properly adjust for such things – but even then, I mean, that death number, come on. When I break things up into regions it seems likely that last week wasn’t getting ahead of itself, and we should expect some ‘catch up’ growth in cases this coming week.

The death count is clearly artificially low, at least in terms of comparing it to expected future calculations, especially in the South. I am anticipating many of those missing deaths being counted in the coming week. There is however also the possibility that this also partly represents the drop-off of ‘legacy’ deaths that are only sort-of Covid deaths, as it is still above 1% of cases reported a few weeks ago whereas the real IFR is going to be a lot lower than that. So it’s not like the number is fully impossibl...
Understanding the Merging of Opinions with Increasing Information theorem
by ViktoriaMalyasova — 2022-04-21T14:13:34.761Z

Merging of opinions is a classical theorem in probability theory proved by Blackwell and Dubins in 1962. [1] It is often cited by researcher Vanessa Kosoy, so I decided to try and understand it as a first step to understanding the infrabayesianism theory.

Introduction

Intuitively, the theorem says that under certain conditions two people observing the same sequence of events and conditioning their beliefs on them will eventually reach consensus in their predictions of future events.

For example, suppose Ann and Bob observe an infinite sequence of coin tosses. They have prior probability measures on the space of infinite binary sequences and they make predictions about the future outcomes by conditioning on the observed outcomes. Then as long as Bob's prior probability Q is absolutely continuous with respect to Ann's prior probability P, (i.e. for all measurable sets E,P(E)=0⟹Q(E)=0), Bob's predictions and Ann's predictions will grow close with Q-probability 1.

This theorem gives a philosophical justification to subjective Bayesianism, the branch of Bayesianism that holds that there is no objective, uniquely rational prior. Bayesian agents may start out with different priors, but as long as they agree on which events are possible at all, their predictions will merge as they keep recieving more evidence. Another possible interpretation is that Q describes the true data generation process, so as long as our prior probability distribution assigns a positive probability to the true hypothesis, we will converge to accurate predictions of the future.

Formulation of the theorem

To formulate the statement precisely, I will need the concepts of:

regular conditional probability
variational distance

Definition (kernel)

Given a measure space (Y, T, μ) and a measurable space (X, S), a kernel is a function ν:Y×S→[0,1] satisfying two conditions:

For any y∈Y, ν(y,⋅):S→[0,1] is a measure on S;
For any F∈S,ν(⋅,F):Y→[0,1] is a (Borel) measurable function.

Definition (product regular conditional probability)

Let (X×Y,S×T,λ) be a product measure space. A product regular condition probability (product rcp) is a kernel ν:Y×S→[0,1] such that ∀ F∈S,E∈T

λ(F×E)=∫Eν(t,F)λY(dt)

where λY is the marginal distribution of λ on Y: λY(E)=λ(X×E).

Definition (predictive probability).

Suppose we have an ...
When Can You Use a Travel Adapter?
by jefftk — 2022-04-21T14:00:05.539Z

We're currently in the UK, where outlets look like:

Since we're from the US, none of the gear we have will plug into these
sockets. What if we use a travel adapter?

plug intentionally partially inserted to show pins

This accepts the pins from a US plug, and connects them directly to
pins shaped for a UK socket. Is this enough? Sometimes yes,
sometimes no.

The big difference between residential power in the UK and the US is
that the UK uses 230V while the US uses 120V. If a device that
expects 120V gets 230V it might get fried; the other way around
is less likely to destroy the device but still won't work. Luckily,
devices say what voltages they accept. Either they'll be labeled for
a single voltage, or a range. Some examples, with whether they'll work
in the UK:

110-120V: no

100-240V: yes

100-240V: yes

100-240V: yes

120V: no

100-240V: yes

A good heuristic is that most external power supplies/chargers (for
laptops, phones, tablets, ...) will take a wide range of voltages
while most other things (nightlights, blenders, TVs, fans, ...) will
be either 120V or 230V. But best to check your specific device!

In bathrooms you may find one other type of outlet:

These exist because you'd risk electrocution with a regular outlet in
a wet area like a bathroom. In the US we'd use a GFCI,
but in the UK they use isolation
transformers. Because it's a transformer, it's cheap to add a
center tap and get half the input voltage (115V). They generally do
not produce much power: UK ones are only rated for 200mA (4.6W) and if
you draw much more than that you'll trip a built-in fuse. If you do
have a small US device and no adapter, don't mind connecting it in a
bathroom, and the device says it draws less than 200mA/4.6W and
doesn't have strong frequency preferences (it will be 50Hz instead of
60Hz) you could probably use it for something other than a shaver.

Comment via: facebook
For every choice of AGI difficulty, conditioning on gradual take-off implies shorter timelines.
by Francis Rhys Ward — 2022-04-21T07:44:54.016Z

Alternate titles: Deconfusing Take-off; Taboo “Fast” and “Slow” Take-off.

This post has two main purposes:

To suggest that we taboo the terms "fast" and "slow" take-off in favour of "gradual" and "sudden" take-off, respectively (in order to avoid confusion with “short” and “long” timelines). I also encourage people to discuss take-off "dynamics" instead of take-off "speeds".
To highlight a point made by Buck S. at EAG London and by Paul C.

here

: For every choice of "AGI difficulty", gradual take-off implies shorter timelines.

Although these points have

been

made

before

, I expect some people will be deconfused by this post.

To clarify terms:

Short vs long timelines is the question of when (i.e. by which year) we will develop AGI/TAI/Superintelligence.

Paul Christiano operationalizes a gradual take-off as:

There will be a complete 4 year interval in which world output doubles, before the first 1 year interval in which world output doubles. (Similarly, we’ll see an 8 year doubling before a 2 year doubling, etc.)

Sudden take-off is just the negation of this statement.

Instead of considering economic output, we can also characterize take-off in terms of AI capabilities. For some measure of AI capabilities, we could say a gradual-take-off is a situation in which:

There will be a complete 4 year interval in which AI capabilities double, before the first 1 year interval in which AI capabilities double. (Similarly, we’ll see an 8 year doubling before a 2 year doubling, etc.)

Daniel Kokotajlo also

argues against

GDP as a metric for AI timelines and take-off dynamics, pointing to other factors that we actually care about (e.g. warning-shots, multi-polarity, etc).

Take-off is therefore not a question about timelines – it’s a question about AI capabilities (or the economic usefulness of AI) before some threshold level which is sufficient for explosive growth (e.g.

the level of intelligence needed for recursive self-improvement, or some discontinuous phase-change in capabilities

).

Here is a graph of gradual vs sudden take-off (for completeness I’ve included a

“no take-off”

curve):

As you can see, the gradual take-off scenario happens at an earlier time.

In a gradual take-off world, AI systems become increasingly capable and useful before reaching the threshold for explosive growth. In this w...
When is positive self-talk not worth it due to self-delusion?
by Jack R — 2022-04-21T03:11:06.915Z

This is a pretty funny and quick TED talk about positive psychology that I liked, though I wish it addressed the possibility and harms of self-delusion more.

Questions I now have about deliberately choosing positive thoughts:

How harmful is the self-delusion from choosing positive thoughts?
What does this self-delusion look like, e.g. what are some detailed examples?
How should we account for the dynamic that thinking more positively will actually make outcomes more positive, given that positive thinking makes you more productive in various ways?
What does it mean for your emotions or thoughts to be "more negative or positive than is granted”?