trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Moon is Down; I have not heard the clock
by chemslug — 2021-06-13T01:40:18.944Z

I wanted to share a quick post about something that's made me significantly happier over the past year: knowing what the phase of the moon is on any given day. Importantly, I don't do this with any kind of computer tool. It's a proxy for "am I spending enough time outside", but because I don't let myself cheat and rely on actually seeing the moon at least every few days, I've succeeded in not Goodharting myself, at least so far.

One of the things that helped me do this successfully was figuring out what time of day I could expect to see the moon during the different phases. I know, I know, it's a trivial exercise in orbital mechanics, so maybe all of you do this instinctively, but it wasn't something anyone ever explained to me explicitly. It actually took two disparate works of fiction to make the connection for me.

The first literary clue comes from my favorite Shakespeare play, Macbeth. Scene II, Act I starts with Banquo and Fleance in the court of Macbeth's castle:

Banquo: How goes the night, boy?

Fleance: The moon is down; I have not heard the clock.

Banquo: And she goes down at twelve.

Fleance: I take't, 'tis later, sir

The second clue (here's where the penny really dropped) is from Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, where the main character says "First quarter moon sets at midnight where I come from."

Of course, the true first-quarter moon sets at midnight regardless of where you are because at (solar) midnight, the place you're standing is facing as far from the sun as it can be, and the first quarter moon means that the sun-moon-earth angle is a 90-degree angle. (This is also true at the third-quarter moon, but at that phase, the moon comes up at midnight).

To be more explicit, at the new moon, the moon is almost between the sun and the earth (if it's exactly between, you get a solar eclipse!) so the moon rises and sets near when the sun does, but it's tough to see. A waxing crescent moon comes up gradually later in the morning but is easiest to see shortly after sunset, just as it's going down. The first-quarter moon comes up at noon and, as we've already covered, goes down at midnight. Waxing gibbous moons come up in the afternoon and set in the early morning, before sunrise. At the full moon, the earth is almost between the sun and the moon so the moon comes up around sunset and sets ...
A systematic error that lead to a bad policy response to COVID-19
by ChristianKl — 2021-06-12T19:56:30.399Z

Introduction

When it comes to dealing with adopting good COVID-19 policies, our civilization failed. This suggests low ability to respond well to another future crisis that might be an X-risk. While we made multiple classes of errors this post will look at one particular class of errors. The failure to come to synthesis through dialectic reasoning. In dialectics, the Fichtean "thesis–antithesis–synthesis" model, when there are two opposing positions A and B there’s the idea that it's often possible to develop a new position S that builds on the ideas of both positions with S being superior to both A and B.

Examples

Requiring FFP-2 masks

Thesis:

FFP-2 masks should be required because it’s what medical professionals use to protect themselves against infection.

Antithesis:

Medical professionals get regular fit-testing while only

25–75%

of people without fit-testing use them successfully and most of the benefit they provide over OP-masks comes from using them correctly.

Synthesis:

Require FFP-2-masks and make fit-testing easily available for non-medical personnel.

Create an additional FFP-X category, where the manufacturer only needs to do one study to get them to the market and that study consists of giving a representative group fit-tests with the mask. Require the seller of the masks to tell the customers about the fit-test success rate of the mask

Allow DIY antibody tests

Thesis:

DIY antibody tests allow people to reduce the chance to infect other people by staying home when the test is positive.

Antithesis:

The high false-negative rate of DIY antibody tests gives people false confidence and potentially induces them to reckless behavior.

Synthesis:

Easy: Allow DIY antibody tests but require publishing sensivity/specificity in the product name whenever the product is sold or otherwise marketed.

Hard: Create a central app that gathers as much information as possible and that allows interpreting the test for the user given his background variables and that calculates MICRO-COVID for infecting other people for user selected activities.

The Situation in Berlin

In both examples we had a policy debate where the authorities first argued the antithesis and after the thesis good enough support switched to and not the synthesis.

This is surprising because the synthesis would provide more benefits, coming up with the synthesis isn’...
Why do patients in mental institutions get so little attention in the public discourse?
by ChristianKl — 2021-06-12T17:37:41.744Z

Scott writes in My IRB nightmare about how his colleague took people freedom away and justified it with tests that aren't validated for the purpose of diagnosis and that have a warning THIS IS JUST A SCREENING TEST IT IS NOT INTENDED FOR DIAGNOSIS.

This can only happen because there's very little public accountability and suggests that a lot of abuse of power is going on. While the US has a lower psychiatric hospitals bed count then many other OECD countries, there are still ~80,000 people in those institutions. A lot of them effective have very little rights and have to endure medical procedures without them consenting such as taking various drugs.

Mental health people seem to me like they should be classified as a marginalized group by the ideals of modern left. On the other hand the modern left put very little attention on fighting for the their rights as evidenced by Scott's colleague getting away with major abuse of power.

Why is the state of affairs like it is? Why don't they get more attention?
Internal Memo from Bleggs Universal
by kithpendragon — 2021-06-12T16:44:22.912Z

To: Local Management Team; Regional Management Team

From: Jake Bleggslee

Subject: RE: Inventory Discrepancies

Attachment: Rolling Shutter Distortion Examples

As you are all doubtless aware, the Inventory Check, like other components of the database control system it’s part of, is prone to certain biases and errors.

Although the numbers displayed in BleggsUniversal® Report Processing Software may be the RealTruth™, that isn’t enough to cause them to actually be correct. This is a fact we collide with every so often, usually resulting in some minor frustration and a lot of excitement. Especially when we start to experience an edge case (such as when certain resources are more densely allocated at some facilities than others), the noisy nature of database management becomes more evident.

Before I continue: My intention here is not to excuse suboptimal habits and practices; those should certainly be addressed. Rather, I aim to add a little context and a little detail to the discussion from last night's meeting in order to help calibrate expectations for working with a database that is being expected to track as many different entities, and handle as many different situations from as many input sources as this one is. Hopefully we can decrease the amount of surprise and stress that tends to spread around whenever these edge cases come up.

Zooming Out: Lots of Access Points, Lots of Users

So much is asked of any database system that must include components throughout the BleggsUniversal® Relocative Network, and that tracks the movements of everything from individual BleggsUniversal® Transport Trollies (which are treated as interchangable by almost every department, but tracked individually for Maintenance) to whole shipments riding in their interconnected (and individually trackable) BleggsUniversal® Linked Long External Transporters. Inventory Checks are one important process in the management of such a system. These reality checks work together with events originating in Sorting, Processing, Maintenance, and at every other computer terminal throughout the network to help the database reflect the real state of the physical systems it represents. All this comprises a constant effort to pump against the entropic tendency of all record keeping systems to decay into meaningless noise.

Each component of this effort is prone to its own biases and errors. For ...
Some people just won't get it
by Amir Bolous — 2021-06-12T15:10:05.456Z

This is a link post for https://amirbolous.com/posts/advice

Introduction

Heuristics for Good Advice

Closing Thoughts

Introduction

The counterintuitive thing about advice is that although it can be incredibly useful, it can also do more harm than good. Advice is a double-edged sword, had certain extremely successful people listened to (certain) family members or friends for example, they undoubtedly would not have gotten to where they are now.

If you're doing something niche or untraditional, especially relative to people who are in close proximity to you (geographically e.g. people in your neighborhood or socially e.g. people you go to school with or work with etc.) many people will look down on you and think what you're doing is weird or a waste of time. They might generously offer advice to "stop wasting your time" and "do something else." They might graciously give you a detailed list or explanation of why you will fail or why something that you're doing is pointless. Often with good intentions. If they don't know you well, they might judge you and make sarcastic and funny jokes at your expense. Or just directly call you stupid. Others might look straight past you and very, very few will acknowledge they don't enough about said thing to understand it but they wish you the best.

How do you determine whether advice is valuable to consider and take or not? Acknowledging every piece of advice will clearly just lead you astray, at some point you have to create filters that block out the noise, otherwise the actually useful advice will become indistinguishable from the noise.

Heuristics for Good Advice

What's a good proxy or heuristic to determine whether you should even consider someone's advice, let alone take it?

In the domain or field or specific interest or hobby or relationships or whatever you're doing, think of the people you look up to and respect the most. Is this person someone in the top 5 (to 10) people you look up the most on the axes or dimensions you care about. For example, has this person succeeded or failed at (and learned from) the start up game if that's the game you're playing? Is this person a kind, good-natured person if this is a relationship question? Notice, I said the top 5 people you look up to and respect the most. I didn't say is this person a reasonable and logical person who might offer a reasonable suggestion. I didn't say is

...
Is the length of the Covid-19 incubation period likely to be affected by whether you are vaccinated?
by Josh Jacobson — 2021-06-12T03:27:53.840Z

Covid-19 symptoms typically present 2-14 days after exposure in unvaccinated people, with an average presentation at 5 days post-exposure.

Is this period likely to be affected by having been vaccinated? Amongst those who catch Covid 2+ weeks after receiving an mRNA vaccine, will their average presentation be >5 days, and the range look more like 4-20 days, or something?

(I live with an immunocompromised individual who cannot be successfully vaccinated, so this is decision-relevant for me. Informed guesses are welcome.)
Does anyone have any Data Sidequests?
by abstractapplic — 2021-06-11T23:40:09.844Z

I’ve spent the past few years thinking about how to create legible ML models, and the past few months applying those ideas. I now have a library of public-domain scripts that let me feature-select, constrain, and fit a model which can then be described using simple graphs while maintaining similar performance to XGBoost and other ‘standard’ ML algorithms. I want to try my approach in the real world, and finding non-toy Data Science problems that people want help with has been surprisingly hard thus far.

I’d describe my approach and motivation in more detail, but akur8 has me covered: I do what they do, except less professionally, less expensively, more flexibly, without proprietary code, and without the exclusive focus on insurance pricing (though my approach is optimized for that, since it’s where I started). Also, I have a truly marvellous method for modelling interactions between features which this margin is too small to contain (tl;dr fit multiple models in parallel).

I’d also be (less) interested in any kind of Analysis work. If anyone wants to hand me a dataset and some vague instructions, then get back a report that looks kind of like this (but better, since I have the benefit of three years’ extra experience), I’d be up for that.

I’m willing to work for free on EA tasks, and would ask for only a nominal fee to work on anything else; I may end up raising my prices later, but right now I just want to apply my skills to something meaningful ASAP. If your organisation is such that recruiting a random stranger you met on an internet forum to do Data Science/Data Analysis seems both tempting and viable, I want to talk to you.

Any takers? Or any helpful opinions on what I’m doing?

ETA: This post somehow led to me getting a full-time job; I'm no longer actively seeking out Data work at time of writing; I have updated significantly in the direction of "asking for things on LessWrong is a good idea".

ETA^2: I'm now actively looking for work again.
Comment on the lab leak hypothesis
by Jeffrey Ladish — 2021-06-11T22:49:58.414Z

A friend of mine requested that I write up some of my comments on the lab leak hypothesis, since I had done quite a bit of research into this in 2020. This was originally asked in the context of the longform Facebook post that Eliezer wrote regarding the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and the implications for the future: https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159653334879228
My comment is less organized than I would prefer, but I figured it was better to post in a rough form than not post at all.

In early January 2021, I wrote on Facebook and Lesswrong:

I've done a lot of thinking about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and I still find the lab escape hypothesis quite credible. We still haven't found an intermediate host, which is surprising if the virus emerged naturally. This issue has become politicized, but we really need a neutral investigation in order to figure out what actually happened. This is quite important for understanding how to prevent future pandemics.

The New York Magazine article, "

The Lab-leak Hypothesis

" is long, but I can personally verify the author is reporting on the source material pretty accurately. I've done over 200 hours of research on this topic and have read basically all the sources the article cites. That said, I don't agree with all of the claims. I do not think the SARS-CoV-2 virus is very likely to have been created using the RATG13 virus, because of the genetic differences spread out throughout the genomes. However, there are many other paths that could have led to a lab escape, and I'm somewhat agnostic between several of them.

I believe we need more transparency into the whole investigation, especially the efforts on the ground in China. What is the process by which scientists in Hubei, Yunnan, and other provinces are looking for intermediate hosts? How have the investigation(s) into the WIV been organized and what processes did they use? What agencies, methods, and results?

COVID-19 has had a huge effect on the whole world. It's politically appropriate to call for accountability in these investigations, because there is a clear public interest for literally the whole global population.

I think that the Covid-19 pandemic was the result of a lab escape, with 85% probability. I'm up for bets with people who think a lab escape is unlikely. The clearest resolution criteria I can imagine involve the question of whe...
Overview of Rethink Priorities’ work on risks from nuclear weapons
by MichaelA — 2021-06-11T20:05:18.103Z

This post overviews the work that Rethink Priorities has done and is doing on risks from nuclear weapons, as well as the theory of change for this work. This is intended to help readers understand how our posts on this topic fit together and what impact we ultimately intend them to have. Note that this post isn’t a summary of our work on nuclear risk; we plan to produce such summaries later. This is cross-posted from the EA Forum.

In 2019, Rethink Priorities (RP) began investigating risks from nuclear weapons in order to determine:

The extent to which nuclear risk reduction should be prioritized by effective altruists (and particularly long termism)

The most effective ways to reduce nuclear risk

This project was led by Luisa Rodriguez until early 2020, was paused when Luisa left Rethink Priorities,[1] and was resumed by me when I joined Rethink Priorities at the end of 2020. New posts related to this project will be published over the coming months.

Our work on nuclear risk is centred on investigating the likelihood of various nuclear conflict scenarios, how harmful those scenarios would be (particularly for the long-term future), what interventions are available for reducing those likelihoods and/or harms, and how cost-effective those interventions are. This research can mostly be divided into three categories:[2]

Investigation of key uncertainties that are relevant across a range of nuclear war scenarios, such as:

What are the various ways a nuclear conflict could start and play out?

If nuclear conflict occurs, how many warheads are likely to be used, and against what kinds of targets?

If nuclear conflict occurs, how large would the effects on the climate and crop yields be?

Given various possible crop yield declines, how many people would die?

How might various future technological developments affect nuclear risk?

Modelling the likelihood and harms of nuclear conflicts between specific pairs or groups of countries, especially:

The US and Russia

China and its potential adversaries (the US, India, or Russia)

Perhaps India and Pakistan

Identifying, collating, and evaluating intervention options for reducing nuclear risk, such as diplomacy, treaties, public advocacy, targeted advocacy, technical assistance and capacity building, and research

All published posts related to this project are collected in the sequence Risks from Nuclear Weapons.

We will a...
Self-study ideas for micro-projects in "abstract" subjects?
by DirectedEvolution — 2021-06-11T19:09:28.973Z

Music and the arts, programming, and cooking have a wonderful property in common. They are all extremely compatible with micro-projects. By this, I mean that it's pretty easy for an artist, coder, or cook of any skill level to find a real-world, interesting project that's targeted to any given new skill that they're trying to build. Trying to learn sixth position or expand into the third register on the trombone? Working on callbacks in Javascript? Learning to cook vegan food? The passionate community surrounding these activities will have songs, coding projects, and recipes galore for you to build those micro-skills on micro-projects. Even if you're studying sociology, you can often explore the theories by sitting in a cafe and observing the behavior of people around you.

I think one property people point to when they refer to subjects as "abstract" or "hard" is that they aren't very amenable to such micro-projects. Some examples of subjects like this include math, chemistry, and microbiology. There might be lots of applications you can pursue once you've developed a sophisticated understanding of the subject. If you're able to get an entry-level job in the field, you might be able to get lots of exercise on a small subset of the skills that go into the subject. If you're willing to spend a lot of money, you can sometimes buy the equipment to do at least some practice with these subjects at home, though you might also face regulatory and legal barriers. Perhaps you can find tractable, fun projects that are thematically related to the subject, but they're unlikely to precisely and comprehensively target the material on, say, the level of chapter sub-sub-headings.

Usually, curriculum designers and teachers tackle this challenge with homework problems, exams, labs, debates, and classroom discussion. But there are two problems. First, a self-studier might not have access to all those resources. Second, those tasks often lack the juicy, real-world applied interest that creates a genuine enthusiasm in the student.

If you've had some success with this challenge, or know of useful resources for exploring it further, I'd love to hear about it!

Note: All subjects and experiences are welcome. It's OK if answers stray slightly off-topic or lead off in different directions.
Am I anti-social if I get vaccinated now?
by FlorianH — 2021-06-11T15:42:27.699Z

In the West, or at least in my home country (Switzerland), we have ample vaccine supply, and are - at the moment - controlling Covid more or less fine.

I read of urges to provide vaccines to poor countries where even health workers could not get vaccinated due to lack of vaccines. And I interpret e.g. the WTO talks about a Covid Vaccine patent waiver* as suggesting that there is really an absolute production shortage.

So: is does half-young and healthy me taking the vaccine - while the vulnerable in my country, and most of my peers too, have received the seemingly highly effective vaccine - essentially steal away two doses that might otherwise have ended up at places where they are very urgently needed?
Alarms Are Better Than Chivvying
by jefftk — 2021-06-11T15:30:05.982Z

Lily recently told me that she wanted to be a big kid, and we talked
about what that could mean. She decided she wanted to be fully
responsible for getting ready and going to school in the morning. The
biggest challenge was going to be timing: normally I walk her through
the process, reminding her to do various things, getting her out and
ready for school in time. Lots of "if you don't finish up soon you're
going to be late" sorts of reminders. This didn't work especially
well, and neither of us liked it.

We thought together of how this could work, and the standard approach
of glancing over at the clock every so often to see how much time you
have left didn't seem like something she would be able to do yet. We
decided to use alarms. I set up three on her tablet: start getting
ready (7:15), leaving in five minutes (7:55), and time to leave
(8:00). I don't give her any additional timing reminders; everything
is up to her now.

This has worked well: we started with this on Wednesday morning, and
the last three days she's accomplished everything on her list and left
for school on time. Today was a bit rushed, where she lost track of
time listening to a podcast while getting
ready, and hadn't yet packed her lunch at the "leaving in five
minutes" alarm. Still, she left with enough time to get to school
before her class went in.

If this started being more of an issue, I could see setting an alarm
at some thing like 7:45 for "time to make lunch"?

This is the same approach we used for her school calls when the kids
were watching themselves;
previously whoever was watching her with keep track of time. It was a
good improvement there too.

Both of those are cases where there is some external schedule we need
to follow. When there isn't one, my preference is generally to just
let the kids go on at whatever pace they prefer; that is what Anna
does in the mornings now.