trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
International Conflict X-Risk in the Era of COVID-19
by  — 2020-03-18T11:42:42.538Z

Jeremy Hussel had a great comment pointing out something which is easy to forget - major disasters often have multiple quasi-independent causes. Many things go wrong all at once, and any safeguards are overwhelmed by the repeated issues. COVID-19 could clearly be one of those root causes. What might be others?

Another clear source of turmoil for the western world right now is domestic politics. America has a historically unpredictable president and is heading into a divisive election year where the two candidates are both likely to be very old. The UK is finally going to leave the EU and hasn’t yet struck a deal to determine what that actually means. Canada (where I live, though less critical on the world stage) was in the middle of its own domestic crisis around Native American land rights and infrastructure projects before that got overshadowed by COVID-19 - our railroads and as such some parts of our supply chain had been shut down for weeks already by protesters.

A third source of problems might be the “oil war” between OPEC and Russia, but I don’t know enough about that to really write about it usefully.

With all that said, the thing that I am most afraid of right now is China. China has been very aggressive on the world stage in the last couple of days, and I fully expect them to continue that pattern. Why wouldn’t they? Just as their country is recovering from the virus and starting to pick back up, the crisis in America and Europe is still growing. They are feeling strong while Western democracies are weak, divided, and looking inwards, and we should fully expect them to take advantage of that power imbalance in the short term to do things like finally and properly annexing Hong Kong (predict 50% that by the time COVID-19 has run its course in North America, Hong Kong has lost whatever quasi-independence it might have had).

The question is how far they will go, and how will we (our governments) react? In normal times I would expect them to be cautious but I would also expect a cautious response from western governments. With the current volatility in the American system and the antagonism built up over the previous Chinese-American trade war, there is substantial risk of something escalating out of control. A full military conflict between world powers at this point in time would truly be something else going terribly, terribly wrong.

[cross-posted to Gra

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Makeshift face touch warner
by rmoehn — 2020-03-18T09:38:42.476Z

If you strap this device to your forearm, it vibrates when you raise your arm to
touch your face. Useful? Not sure, because one gets many false positives. Cheap? Yes. Applicable everywhere? Yes.

Update 2020-03-19: I've been using it all day while working at my desk and it has warned me of touching my face several times. I got rid of false alarms while typing, mousing or handwriting by pointing the tilt switch slightly towards the outside (ulnar side) of my arm.

It consists of three main components (available from Amazon and other online retailers):

tilt switch

vibration motor

3 V battery

Plus some cardboard and tape. No soldering required. For holding this to your arm, you can use a sweat wristband or the elastic part of an old sock. Or rubber bands if you're hard up.

If you want to know details of how to build it, let me know and I will improve the design and post instructions here. (People coming from the outside can email me: <given name of President Nixon>.moehn@posteo.de)

Alternatives

Instructables: Don't Touch
Face – This is where I got the idea. It's bigger and requires more equipment.

Do Not Touch Your Face and DontTouchFace.com web apps. – Only
work when you sit at your computer.

Immutouch – Probably fewer false positives. Takes
longer to ship. More expensive if you disregard the cost of your time.

surgical mask/respirator
Assorted thoughts on the coronavirus
by Adam Zerner — 2020-03-18T07:08:30.614Z

Epistemic status: Ramblings. Sorry for the tone. It was easier to write this way. I promise I won't be stubborn about any of this in the comments.

Is it that bad?

After reading Mr. Money Mustache's take on the coronavirus, I started having a few doubts about how bad it actually is. I didn't realize that 2M people in America die each year of things related to "lifestyle factors".

It's possible that the coronavirus might be much worse than that. Let's say the worst case scenario is 50% infected and 10% of those infected die. In America that would mean about 150M infected and 15M dead. Almost an order of magnitude more than what what currently happens with lifestyle factors, so that's a lot.

But for a more average case scenario let's say 25% infected and 3% death rate, which would mean 75M infected and 2.25M deaths. An amount of deaths on par with the deaths we currently have due to lifestyle factors.

And for a more hopeful scenario, let's say 10% infected and a 2% death rate, which would mean 30M infected and 600k deaths. Less than a third of the lifestyle factors deaths.

Maybe the coronavirus is scarier than the lifestyle factor deaths we currently seem to just accept. But how much scarier? Mr Money Mustache asks this question:

But do you feel the appropriate ratios of fear in these two situations?

I know that my level of fear seems to be weighted too strongly towards the coronavirus.

This all makes me think of one of my favorite movie scenes: where the Joker talks about things that are "part of the plan".

Existential risks are still a much bigger problem

Sorry for being so America-centric in the previous section. Let's look at worst case scenario for the entire world. Call it a 50% infection rate and 10% death rate. That'd be about 4B infected and 400M dead.

400M dead is certainly a lot, but I think it pales in comparison to the consequences of screwing up with existential risks. As Eliezer says in his Twitter bio:

Ours is the era of inadequate AI alignment theory. Any other facts about this era are relatively unimportant, but sometimes I tweet about them anyway.

And if that's true, then by focusing on the current LessWrong Coronavirus Agenda, are we purchasing fuzzies or utilons?

QUALYS and happiness

If existential risk wasn't a thing, my attention would probably be on The Happiness Crisis. Tha...
Where can we donate time and money to avert coronavirus deaths?
by Elizabeth — 2020-03-18T04:50:13.629Z

There are a lot of people who desperately want to give away their time, money, and expertise for other people’s lives right now. Where should they go? What projects already exist that need their resources, and specifically what do they need? What successful projects can be copied (e.g. hyperlocal lobbying efforts)? What projects should exist but don’t yet?
How can we estimate how many people are C19 infected in an area?

by Elizabeth — 2020-03-18T04:49:35.680Z

My favorite dashboard is

Our World in Data

: it has time series and maps and lets me choose which countries to graph. But it’s only showing confirmed cases, and doesn’t show any unit smaller than a country. Plus on the day I’m writing this, the US was missing yesterday’s day.

Plague Plus

is trying to do true prevalence estimates, but I don’t like their methodology, in part because it’s the same for every country.

Can I do better than this? Is something out there that shows city level data, with time series? If I must use confirmed cases, how can I translate those numbers into true prevalence estimates, given region-specific conditions?
LessWrong Coronavirus Agenda
by Elizabeth — 2020-03-18T04:48:56.769Z

I’ve gone through a lot of introductions to this post but maybe this is the most honest one:

I am scared. Quite scared, actually. My chances of catching COVID-19 are actually quite low, and my chances of surviving it if I do are quite high, and I’m still scared. What if I get into a car accident and have to go to the ER? Will they have a bed for me? Will I leave with coronavirus? What are my pregnant friends going to do? What is anyone over 70 going to do?

My goal, and the goal of everyone on the LW staff, and I assume most everyone who’s participated in all the coronavirus threads, has been to figure out what is happening and what we can do about it. We’ve already done a lot. Posts like Seeing the Smoke got coronavirus on people’s radar faster than it otherwise would have been, aided by the numerous modeling threads backing it up. The Quarantine Preparations thread gave people a starting place to act from. The Justified Practical Advice (summary) thread let us share our expertise, in ways that led to concrete behavioral changes. More recently we examined asymptomatic transmission. I’ve had a legit, reasonably high ranking government official say they look at us to see where everyone else will be in weeks.

This is currently the LessWrong team’s top priority, and they’ve done a number of things over the recent weeks to facilitate research and action on coronavirus, including hiring me to be a point person on it. To facilitate as much progress as possible over the coming weeks, habryka and I have compiled a list of what we consider the most important questions in fighting COVID, and are asking anyone with the skill to help us answer them.

That list is at the end of this post. But first, what is the overall plan here?

Who are we trying to help?

We have three broad categories of potential beneficiaries in mind:

Individuals making choices for themselves and their loved ones, who need accurate information about the current threat level and how to lower it with existing tech.
Individuals creating the tools for the people above, meaning anything from noticing that copper tape is anti-viral to creating plans for DIY non-invasive ventilators, who need accurate information about how COVID-19 operates and where the current gaps and bottlenecks are. We’d like to help people in this group get volunteers and money

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Zeynep Tufekci on Why Telling People They Don't Need Masks Backfired
by Zack_M_Davis — 2020-03-18T04:34:09.644Z
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-masks.html

In The New York Times op-ed section (archive link), information science professor Zeynep Tufekci argues that health authorities damaged their own credibility by misleadingly claiming that masks aren't useful for healthy people rather than being forthright about the need to conserve masks for doctors and nurses in the face of a shortage. (Elizabeth van Nostrand and Jim Babcock made a similar argument on this website the week before last.)
March 16th: Daily Coronavirus Links
by habryka — 2020-03-18T00:00:33.273Z

As part of the LessWrong Coronavirus Link Database, Ben, Elizabeth and I are publishing daily update posts with all the new links we are adding each day that we ranked a 3 or above in our importance rankings. Here are all the top links that we added yesterday (March 16th), by topic.

Action

Suggestion to collate local response data

Rob Wiblin suggests collecting and summarising locality responses to C19 and entering on wikipedia, because other localities may turn to it to inform their own response.

Aggregators

FB discussion of volunteer opportunities

Jess Riedel collects volunteer opportunities.

Dashboards

1Point3Acres US dashboard

Includes map and list of statistics aggregated by state and count

Everyday Life

Bay Area to issue Shelter In Place orders

6 bay area counties intend to issue shelter-in-place orders at noon today.

Guides/FAQs/Intros

Personal plea for isolation

Rob Bensinger explains why he thinks isolation is essential

Medical System

Analysis of chloroquine as an effective treatment for Coronavirus

Long doc by Stanford PhD and other researchers arguing that this has the potential as a cure, offering info (like mechanism of action) and arguing for more research. Translated into Spanish.

Progression/Outcome

Lit Review of Risk for Young People of COVID-19 by Sarah Constantin

Uses data from China, South Korea. Also analyses costs of getting the disease when hospital beds are unavailable, suggesting a 1-2% fatality rate in that situation.

Spread & Prevention

Configurable model of spread

Visual display of outcome counts based on a highly configurable transmission model

Collection of estimates of various C19 parameters

Contains both links to papers and their particular estimates for various parameters, including: R0, severity, IFR, CFR, incubation period, serial interval, infectious period, hospital time, doubling time, and prevalence

France recommends no NSAID except tylenol

France notes hospitalized young people have often taken common NSAIDS (except paracetamol) and recommends against it

(EV) I'm really skeptical that this is a real result

Paper: Advice for UK Government Responses to Covid-19 (influential in UK decision-making)

"The expert epidemiological modelling that likely informed the UK Government's policy change today." - Rob Wiblin

Other

Predictions about C19

Good Judgement Project Open's collection of C19-related predictions

Link to Full Database
What is Interpretability?
by RobertKirk — 2020-03-17T20:23:33.002Z

In this post we lay out some ideas around framing interpretability research which we have found quite useful. Our framing is goal-oriented, which we believe is important for making sure interpretability research is meaningful. We also go over a variety of dimensions which we think are useful to consider when thinking about interpretability research. We wanted to have a shared vocabulary when talking about this kind of research, and found that these ideas helped us communicate effectively.

One of our motivations for having these thoughts and discussions is so we can understand the relevance of interpretability to alignment, and to help us think about which categories or dimensions of interpretability research are important for alignment of strong AI. In a coming post we discuss interpretability and alignment, using the ideas from this post and other previous writing on the subject.

Interpretability, transparency, explainability?

A quick note on terminology. Many terms are used to mean many similar things in the interpretability research literature. We think of Interpretability as the broadest possible category, which is why it can be hard to define and operationalise. Two specific terms are used with frequency apart from interpretability - explainability and transparency - and following the definitions in The Mythos Of Model Interpretability (summarised in more detail in the appendix), we’ll use them as follows:

Explainability is usually a post-hoc action, where we want to understand and explain why a model made a specific prediction (or enacted certain behaviour) after the fact.

Transparency is normally seen as a more intrinsic property of a model, and is about understanding it’s internal workings and mechanisms. This is often a harder property to achieve. This can often mean a human would be able to “Run an approximation of the algorithm in their head”.

Dimensions for interpretability

We found two dimensions most useful to consider when thinking about interpretability. The first dimension (Goals) is concerned with which goals interpretability research aims to fulfil. The second (Enabling Humans) refers to the idea that interpretability is human-centred, and we feel that interpretability methods normally must have a human involved in interpreting the model for them to be meaningful. We could also consider agents acting on behalf of humans (i.e. in amplifica

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When will total cases in the EU surpass that of China?
by jmh — 2020-03-17T12:34:32.980Z

Pretty much says it all. Bloomburg show the count for Europe as 64 thousand and doesn't look like the curve is ready to level off.

Do people think a couple of days for Europe to exceed China's (near 81,000) or more?

The follow up is what will be the total?
Let My People Stay Home
by Zvi — 2020-03-17T12:10:00.594Z

When the Jews left Egypt, they were in such a hurry that they did not have time for their bread to rise.

When we packed up the most important things in our apartment, we were forced to leave the bread behind. The pizza was ready in eighteen minutes.

Last real pizza for a while. Happy belated pie day.

We cut it closer than we should have. Our haste turned out to be an overreaction, in the sense that we were able to return the next day and get essentially everything that wasn’t furniture. But it wasn’t enough of an overreaction. Because there was a chance it wasn’t an overreaction. On an exponential curve, exactly correct reactions are not a thing. We could have been stranded. And it’s likely our furniture does get stranded.

Alas, it is hard to overreact. We did ordinary cheap preparing. We had a month’s worth of food, all our medicines and stuff like that. Initially I thought that would be the plan. Hunker down in our apartment, take deliveries with increasing caution, get through this.

Increasingly as the day drew near it became clear this wasn’t a great idea. Going in and out of the apartment at all would be unsafe. Either the nanny would be living with us, or she wouldn’t be available. Either way, the place was so small for us and two children. My wife became increasingly convinced we’d go insane.

So we had to go. We picked a location, where we could ride things out reasonably. We got a real estate agent to go look at houses. But we didn’t want to halt her business too soon, for fear that it would permanently cost clients. So we didn’t see anything until the weekend. At which time, our blowhard mayor took a break from going to the YMCA each morning to say that he was ‘considering a lockdown.’

Which is excellent news. Since, obviously, lock it down. But for us, it meant we could be stranded halfway. We’d be outside, with none of our things. Or we’d be inside, with no way to get out, and a lease we couldn’t use. Everyone was freaking out.

The freaking out is in many ways the worst of it. Sleep has come, but it’s been tricky. Work goes forward when I can, but it’s hard to focus. Keeping up with events seems important. But I don’t know a way to do that and not obsess. Twitter is the best news source yet terrible for one’s mental health. Everyone makes dumb decisions. Everyone is filled with regret. Regret we didn’t get the place ready a month ago.

Regret I didn’t sell ...
And was it for rational, object-level reasons?
by DanArmak — 2020-03-17T10:30:20.070Z

When any politician called for the right thing, was it because they really thought it was a good thing? Or was it because their political opposition said e.g. not to worry, so they automatically and necessarily said the opposite?

In other words: suppose you find a politician X who called for good-stuff and they are in the opposition. If counterfactually the party in power had done what you'd want and also called for good-stuff early, would X have stood against it? That obviously affects whether you should take X more seriously on the object level.
Should we all be more hygenic in normal times?
by DanielFilan — 2020-03-17T06:14:23.093Z

I've heard people say that this should be the trigger to be more careful about disease after the pandemic is over: e.g. people with mild colds shouldn't leave the home without a mask, all big events should have hand sanitiser. One example is this opinion piece by Matt Ridley (content warning: politics). What's the evidence on the cost/benefit analysis of marginal hygiene in rich countries when a pandemic isn't looming?
Did any US politician react appropriately to COVID-19 early on?
by DanielFilan — 2020-03-17T06:12:31.523Z

Did any US politician call for quarantining, ventilator production, ICU capacity expansion, PPE stockpiling, or anything of that level of seriousness between January 1 and March 1? I'd like to know (a) so that I can take any such politician more seriously and (b) to better calibrate my sense of the adequacy of the US political system (since I live in the US).
Good News: the Containment Measures are Working
by Shmi — 2020-03-17T05:49:12.516Z

After weeks and months of rather drastic measures we can see the glimpse of how the lockdowns are making a difference. Here are the snapshots from worldometer:

New cases dropping

New cases leveling off

New Cases switching from exponential to linear

Japan: no Worldometer breakdown, data from Wikipedia

Inconclusive, but apparently sub-exponential

What does it mean for the future? That it takes about a week of a severe lockdown to switch from the exponential growth to linear, about two weeks to switch to leveling off, and three to four weeks to start seeing a meaningful decline. If this pattern holds, then the dire projections of millions dying would not come to pass. The overall toll is likely to be around 100,000 in 2020 if most countries adopt the China/Korea/Italy/Spain-level measures. Moreover, the worst of the pandemic, or at least of this first wave, will be over in 2-3 months, as long as the containment measures are in place, and the countries and jurisdictions that are proactive enough will not have to resort to the worst of the ICU triage any time soon.

This was the good news. The bad news is that this is not sustainable in the medium to long term, given the impact of the measures on the economy, mobility and lifestyle. But maybe the effort to flatten the curve is not in vain. The question is, what's next? Who knows? A viable vaccine is at least a year away, the ICU bed count ramp up may help, some of the social distancing measures such as deliveries, takeouts, telecommuting may prove sustainable enough, but that doesn't seem like nearly enough in the long term.
A game designed to beat AI?
by Long try — 2020-03-17T03:51:33.199Z

It's no surprise LW is dominated by COVID questions right now. My guess is that many of us are holding their ground at home and have more spare time than usual. So here is a question for you: if you are to design a 1v1-type board game and your purpose is to confuse the AIs, to make it as difficult for them as possible, to level the playground between humans & machines, or at least to prolong the period when human players have an upper hand over AIs; then what designs would you use, what elements would you introduce into the game?

Of course, the 2nd most important goal is to make an interesting game, one that fascinate people and keep them playing whenever they have free time - during pandemics, for example.
King and Princess
by jefftk — 2020-03-17T02:10:02.601Z

Sometimes Lily tells me that she is a princess and wants me to be the
king. We'll sit together, me on the throne and her at my side, and
we'll hear cases from our people. An imaginary petitioner describes
the situation to me, and I relay it to Lily. We consult about the
situation, consider the circumstances, and issue a judgement.

For example, at the the most recent session a restaurant owner came to
us unable to make rent because of the shutdown. We decided that they
only owed part of the money, and that they could wait to pay it until
they were open again.

Lily playing a different princess game, with orb and sceptre.

It's not an especially accurate depiction of royalty, or a system of
government I want to encourage, but it's fun talking through people's
situations and figuring out what seems fair.