trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Over $1,000,000 in prizes for COVID-19 work from Emergent Ventures
by jasoncrawford — 2020-03-13T15:46:33.921Z

Tyler Cowen's fund Emergent Ventures is offering:

$500k, second prize $200k, for Best effort to find a good treatment rapidly
$100k for Best blog or social media tracking/analysis of the virus
$100k for Best innovation in social distancing
$100k for Most important innovation or improvement for India
$50k for Best investigative journalism on coronavirus
$50k for Best (justified) coronavirus policy writing

Announcement:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/03/1-million-plus-in-emergent-ventures-prizes-for-coronavirus-work.html

Side note: In the post, Tyler explains why prizes are better than grants in this situation: “The case for prizes is stronger when you don’t know who is likely to make the breakthrough, you value the final output more than the process, there is an urgency to solutions (talent development is too slow), success is relatively easy to define, and efforts and investments are likely to be undercompensated.”
More Dakka for Coronavirus: We need immediate human trials of many vaccine-candidates and simultaneous manufacturing of all of them
by avturchin — 2020-03-13T13:35:05.189Z

Our best chance to fight CV is to create a vaccine as soon as possible. The irony is that we probably already have a vaccine but we can’t prove that it works, until animal safety test, 1 and 2 stage of the clinical trials, which will take 12-18 months at least. How we could accelerate the creation of the vaccine?

There are several ideas, which are mostly inspired by the research of anti-aging drugs, which suffer from the same problem: the need for very long clinical trials. See More Dakka post by Sara Constantin.

Immediate human trials. If we have the vaccine in 3 months, not 18 months, we will save millions of lives. So, based on the trolley problem logic, we may risk the health of a few thousand people to achieve these goals, especially if they were volunteers. Thus we need to start a human test of the vaccine candidates immediately, even before the end of animal trials, which are still needed. here we get acceleration by performing in parallel the actions which are typically done sequentially.
Test safety and efficiency simultaneously. We also should combine 1 stage and 2 stages oа tests, that is safety and efficiency, by giving the vaccine to people who are already under potential exposure to CV, like nurses, or old people in nurseries.
Test on large groups. We should test a vaccine on a large group of people, like 10 000, so any finding will quickly get statistical significance. If the number of infection will decline relative to the control group, we could see it in one month.
Test all vaccine candidates. All said above in 1-3 should be done with each of a dozen vaccine-candidates which are currently under developing. As a result, in one month we could know which vaccine candidate is the strongest and safest.
Manufacturing in advance. Simultaneously, we should start large scale production of all vaccine-candidates, if it is possible. After the best (maybe 3 or 5) vaccine-candidates are validated, the stockpile of failed vaccine-candidates is destroyed, and the best vaccines are delivered to the population. This will help to fight the production delay.
Give people different best vaccines. There is still could be long-term detrimental effects of some of the vaccines, so it may be better not to give everybody just one best vaccine - what if it makes everybody will become sterile in 1 year?
Combine best vaccines.

...
Adaptive Immune System Aging
by johnswentworth — 2020-03-13T03:47:22.056Z

The human adaptive immune system is the “smart” part of the human immune system, the part which learns to recognize specific pathogens, allowing for immunity to e.g. chicken pox. For our current purposes, the key players are T-cells. T-cells start out “naive” and eventually learn to recognize specific antigens, becoming “memory” T-cells. The aged immune system is characterized by a larger fraction of memory relative to naive T-cells (without dramatic change in overall counts). This makes the elderly immune system slower to adapt to new pathogens.

This post is mainly about why the naive:memory T-cell ratio shifts with age, how to undo that shift, and some speculation about implications and applications.

A natural hypothesis (frequently asserted in the literature): the shift toward memory T-cells is driven by slower production of new (naive) T-cells. The T-cells themselves maintain overall cell count by living longer, resulting in a larger proportion of older (memory) cells.

The interesting part: why would the production of new T-cells fall with age?

Turns out there’s an obvious culprit: the thymus. The thymus is the last stop in the production line for new T-cells. It provides a sort of boot camp, training the T-cells to distinguish “self” (your own cells) from “other” (pathogens) using a whole battery of tricks. T-cells which make it through become full-time members of the naive T-cell reserve, and go on to police the body.

With age, the thymus does this:

(source:

PhysAging

). This is called “involution” of the thymus.

Many organs shrink with age, but the thymus is among the most dramatic. Unlike most age-related loss, it starts even before development is complete - the thymus shrinks measurably between day zero and a child’s first birthday. And it keeps on shrinking, at a steady rate, throughout childhood and adult life. The extremely early start of thymic involution suggests it’s more a developmental phenomenon than an age-related phenomenon - perhaps an appropriate hormonal mix could undo thymic involution?

Turns out,

castration of aged mice

(18-24 mo) leads to complete restoration of the thymus in about 2 weeks. The entire organ completely regrows, and the balance of naive to memory T-cells returns to the level seen in young mice. (Replicated

here

.) This is pr...
Crisis and opportunity during coronavirus
by Bird Concept — 2020-03-12T20:20:55.703Z

Note: please put on your own oxygen mask first. Don’t engage with this post if you haven’t taken appropriate measures to prepare yourself and your family; and plausibly don’t engage if you haven’t taken measures to ensure you can do so while staying stable and grounded.

We face a time of global crisis. But in spite of the unfolding tragedy – or perhaps because of it – this will also be a time of great opportunity. If you have the skills, slack, and willingness to act, it might make sense to start looking for ways to contribute (regardless of whether you’re seeking personal gain or altruistic benefit).

Why does this seem like a good opportunity?

There’s a question of whether the current situation should change your overall cause-prioritisation, in determining what’s most useful to work on over a >1 year time-scale.

This depends on where you started in your beliefs. To many readers, this likely does not provide any high-level updates, as we already believed that pandemics were a major risk for which the world was underprepared, and that the major institutions in charge were dysfunctional. (Nonetheless, I am learning a massive amount by living through a time of global crisis when I have the epistemic ability and agency to understand what’s happening and take action.)

Beyond that, there’s the question of whether this is a window of opportunity. Even if your long-term goals remain after this pandemic, are there actions which will have an extraordinarily high leverage now, compared to other times?

I think there are a few reasons for thinking so.

Underpreparation. The world wasn’t prepared. Everyone is scrambling to figure things out and there’s too much for anyone to do. Hundreds of millions of people are suddenly changing their lives. The same goes for hundreds of thousands of companies and hundreds of governments. Most of them have no routines or experience in handling situations like these, which means they’ll be facing problems they have never faced before.
Exponential growth. Each infected person can be responsible for thousands of downstream infections, so the impact of behaviour change has a large multiplier. (Though this is modulo some uncertainty about counterfactual infections which I’m unsure how to think about).
Scale. The pandemic might grow to dir

...
The Critical COVID-19 Infections Are About To Occur: It's Time To Stay Home [crosspost]
by Impassionata — 2020-03-12T18:50:46.272Z

Well I don't know how many of you reading this have been following the spread of Coronavirus. In the line of providing another person who is noticing the smoke in the room, I wrote this last night and started a blog to do it.

Tl;dr: It is reasonable to expect that sometime between March 16th and March 18th, our hospitals will be slammed with cases of COVID-19 needing urgent attention and war-time triage will be applied, if not immediately, then at some soon point beyond that. Your value will be your youth. If you have family members who are at risk (like parents) they should consider the fact that if they leave the house and they get sick they will be going into a healthcare system that cannot give them adequate care and they will have an increased chance of dying. You should feel free to insist that they stay home for the next 5 days, preferably a week if you have the sort of relationship where you can express that sentiment. Once it begins there will not be a need to motivate them to stay.

It could happen sooner. It could happen later. It will happen. Hospitals in your community will be infected and the entire hospital will, essentially, have it.

Everyone for some value of everyone is going to get this. 30% of the population is what they told legislators today.

I feel a little silly writing this out because I'm typical minding: I've been paying attention to this virus for a long time, and I assume everyone is where I'm at.

This is where I'm at. At home. Where I will stay. For as long as possible.

Do your part, motherfuckers, it's a pandemic on and the math to track the impact point says there is still time to make a difference: the infections that comprise the big surge are about to happen. Well. Started happening today. Tomorrow there's just gonna be more.

Original post to follow:

It's Time To Stay Home

If you have the disease and don't know it yet, now is a very very bad time to spread it inadvertently. The people you infect will, if they must go to the hospital, be a part of the epidemic curve that overwhelms the hospital.

If you don't have the disease, now is a very very bad time to catch it, because you will be part of the big wave.

TL;DR: The transmissions that will swamp our hospital systems are about to begin. STAY HOME. For as long as you can.

Many have seen this time-adjust...
Why isn't increasing ventilation of public spaces part of the best practice response to the Coronovirus?
by ChristianKl — 2020-03-12T10:40:47.502Z

It's my impression that there's some spread via aerosol in public spaces like buses and trains. By increasing ventilation in those spaces by opening more windows I find it plausible that we could reduce that transmission.

Why aren't health orgs pushing for increasing ventilation of public spaces?
I'm leaving AI alignment – you better stay
by rmoehn — 2020-03-12T05:58:37.523Z

This diagram summarizes the requirements for independent AI alignment research
and how they are connected.

In this post I'll outline my four-year-long attempt at becoming an AI alignment
researcher. It's an ‘I did X [including what I did wrong], and here's how it
went’ post (see also jefftk's More
writeups!).
I'm not complaining about how people treated me – they treated me well. And I'm
not trying to convince you to abandon AI alignment research – you shouldn't. I'm
not saying that anyone should have done anything differently – except myself.

Requirements

Funding

Funding is the main requirement, because it enables everything else. Thanks to
Paul Christiano I had funding for nine months between January 2019 and January
2020. Thereafter I applied to the EA Foundation Fund (now Center on Long-Term
Risk Fund) and Long-Term Future
Fund for a grant and
they rejected my applications. Now I don't know of any other promising
sources of funding. I also don't know of any AI alignment research
organisation that would hire me as a remote worker.

How much funding you need varies. I settled on 5 kUSD per month, which sounds
like a lot when you're a student, and which sounds like not a lot when you look
at market rates for software developers/ML engineers/ML researchers. On top of
that, I'm essentially a freelancer who has to pay social insurance by himself,
take time off to do accounting and taxes, and build runway for dry periods.

Results and relationships

In any job you must get results and build relationships. If you don't, you don't
earn your pay. (Manager Tools talks about results and relationships all the
time. See for example What You've Been Taught About Management is
Wrong
or First Job
Fundamentals.)

The results I generated weren't obviously good enough to compel Paul to continue
to fund me. And I didn't build good enough relationships with people who could
have convinced the LTFF and EAFF fund managers that I have the potential
they're looking for.

Time

Funding buys time, which I used for study and research.

Another aspect of time is how effectively and efficiently you use it. I'm good
at effective, not so good at efficient. – I spend much time on non-research,
mostly studying Japanese and doing sports. And dawdling. I noticed the dawdling
problem at the end of last year and got it under control at the beginning of
this year (see my time tracking).
Too late.

Added 20...
Puzzles for Physicalists
by jessicata — 2020-03-12T01:37:13.353Z
Link: https://unstableontology.com/2020/03/12/puzzles-for-physicalists/

The following is a list of puzzles that are hard to answer within a broadly-physicalist, objective paradigm. I believe critical agentialism can answer these better than competing frameworks; indeed, I developed it through contemplation on these puzzles, among others. This post will focus on the questions, though, rather than the answers. (Some of the answers can be found in the linked post)

In a sense what I have done is located "anomalies" relative to standard accounts, and concentrated more attention on these anomalies, attempting to produce a theory that explains them, without ruling out its ability to explain those things the standard account already explains well.

Indexicality

(This section would be philosophical plagiarism if I didn't cite On the Origin of Objects.)

Indexicals are phrases whose interpretation depends on the speaker's standpoint, such as "my phone" or "the dog over there". It is often normal to treat indexicals as a kind of shorthand: "my phone" is shorthand for "the phone belonging to Jessica Taylor", and "the dog over there" is shorthand for "the dog existing at coordinates 37.856570, -122.284176". This expansion allows indexicals to be accounted for within an objective, standpoint-independent frame.

However, even these expanded references aren't universally unique. In a very large universe, there may be a twin Earth which also has a dog at coordinates 37.856570, -122.284176. As computer scientists will find obvious, specifying spacial coordinates requires a number of bits logarithmic in the amount of space addressed. These globally unique identifiers get more and more unwieldy the more space is addressed.

Since we don't expand out references enough to be sure they're globally unique, our use of them couldn't depend on such global uniqueness. An accounting of how we refer to things, therefore, cannot posit any causally-effective standpoint-independent frame that assigns semantics.

Indeed, the trouble of globally unique references can also be seen by studying physics itself. Physical causality is spacially local; a particle affects nearby particles, and there's a speed-of-light limitation. For spacial references to be effective (e.g. to connect to observation and action), they have to themselves "move through" local space-and-time.

This is a bit like the problem of having a computer refer to itsel

...
Please Press "Record"
by johnswentworth — 2020-03-11T23:56:27.699Z

Over the years, I've made very heavy use of open courseware/MOOCs. I'd estimate that I've covered about as much material in online lectures as I did in-person during a four year degree.

However, since college I've been frustrated by the general lack of online material for non-101 courses. Sites like coursera, edx, etc seem to have realized that the vast majority of users have basically no relevant background, so they optimize for users with no relevant background - they produce a very repetitive stream of 101-level courses. More advanced material is harder to come by online, even though it's abundant in university course catalogs.

But I hear that many colleges are moving courses online in response to coronavirus. So, a request for any professors out there: press "record" during lectures. You're on video already, you can sort out the details and decide whether to actually put up the recordings later, but for now just push the record button.
Coronavirus tests and probability
by skybrian — 2020-03-11T23:09:47.701Z

I recently had a "duh" moment while reading an Atlantic article. Coronavirus tests are not screening tests! Like, didn’t we all learn about Bayesian probability, sensitivity, and the dangers of false positives and false negatives from a very similar question? And then, when I started reading about coronavirus test distribution in the news, I forgot all about that.

But I don't know what the probabilities are. A brief search didn't find them. Anyone know?

Expectations are tempered; a similar promise from Vice President Mike Pence of 1.5 million tests by the end of last week did not come to pass. But even when these tests eventually are available, some limitations will have to be realized. Among them, these are diagnostic tests, not screening tests—a distinction that should shape expectations about the role doctors will play in helping manage this viral disease.

The difference comes down to a metric known as sensitivity of the test: how many people who have the virus will indeed test positive. No medical test is perfect. Some are too sensitive, meaning that the result may say you’re infected when you’re actually not. Others aren’t sensitive enough, meaning they don’t detect something that is actually there.

The latter is the model for a diagnostic test. These tests can help to confirm that a sick person has the virus; but they can’t always tell you that a person does not. When people come into a clinic or hospital with severe flu-like symptoms, a positive test for the new coronavirus can seal the diagnosis. Screening mildly ill people for the presence of the virus is, however, a different challenge.

“The problem in a scenario like this is false negatives,” says Albert Ko, the chair of epidemiology of microbial diseases at the Yale School of Public Health. If you wanted to use a test to, for example, help you decide whether an elementary-school teacher can go back to work without infecting his whole class, you really need a test that will almost never miss the virus.

“The sensitivity can be less than 100 percent and still be very useful,” Ko says, in many cases. But as that number falls, so does the usefulness of any given result. In China, the sensitivity of tests has been reported to be as low as 30 to 60 percent—meaning roughly half of the people who actually had

...
What are some articles that updated your beliefs a lot on an important topic?
by Mati_Roy — 2020-03-11T22:34:01.691Z

The content doesn't need to be hosted on LessWrong.

It does need to have changed your beliefs personally. If it changed other people's beliefs, please put this as a comment instead.

Also, the article should be more than simply updating you away from your priors. For example, I'm not interested in things like "learning about a new cause you weren't aware of" but rather in things like "changing your mind about the importance of a cause".

I'm also interested in knowing whether the article was the first time you had come across this point, or it just argued that point better than the previous ones.

Information in other format than articles also work: audio, video, pictures, graph, data table, etc.

This is related to a project idea of tracking belief updates with the goals 1) tracking which information is the most valuable so that more people consume it, and 2) seeing how beliefs evolve (which might be evidence in itself about which beliefs are true; although, I think most, including myself, wouldn't think this was the strongest form of evidence).
A practical out-of-the-box solution to slow down COVID-19: Turn up the heat
by Alex_Shleizer — 2020-03-11T22:30:09.698Z

3 days ago there was published a research that swayed me significantly towards the opinion that COVID-19 is spreading better in cold (but not too cold) climates. I believe that the odds for this are probably over 50%, and if it's true there is a practical and scalable (although not extremely cheap) way to slow down significantly the spread of the coronavirus.

Research Claims

It seems that all current pandemic epicenter share a very similar temperature and humidity (5-11OC and 47-79% humidity). Consider the following map:

As you can see all the central outbreak locations are lying only along a narrow east west distribution roughly along the 30-50 N” corridor. This shows a correlation between hyper virus spread and specific climate conditions.

Why do I believe it's probably true?

1. The odds that randomly by pure luck all 6 different epicenters will be with similar climates and latitude seem like a too large of coincidence, even if we take into account that the 30-50N'' corridor does seem more populous than the average. There are many very populated places outside this corridor and none of them got hit as hard.

2. Iran, Italy, China, South Korea are very different places in terms of the political system and government competence, Intuitively it's hard to think about a better explaining cause root that caused the virus to be widely spread specifically in these locations.

3. It could also explain why some places that you would expect to be hit hard, like Thailand (which is the top global destination for Chinese tourism) or Taiwan, for now, don't seem to have it that bad. Both of these countries have a tropical climate. Now granted there could be a higher spread in these countries that is underreported, but if they had it bad as in Italy or Iran it wouldn't go unnoticed.

Implications

What are the implications if we believe the research?

on the downside: as the weather warms up on the northern hemisphere more places will warm up enough and could provide optimal conditions to COVID-19, the researches list the following cities as potentially dangerous areas for coronavirus spread

On the upside, if this is true there is something we might be able to do to slow down the virus spread, and the solution is simple: Increase temperatures in closed public spaces, or more simply - turn up the heat. If the coronavirus truly doesn't like h...