trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Hammer and the Mask - A call to action
by Simon Fischer — 2020-04-19T13:36:03.448Z

Epistemic status: Pretty confident, seems obviously correct.

Summary: We should promote widespread use of reusable silicone masks to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2.

Masks and transmission of SARS-CoV-2

SARS-CoV-2 spreads mainly through respiratory droplets. Most of the discussion of mask usage to prevent transmission has so far been centered on surgical masks and disposable filtering facepiece particle (FFP) masks (also called respirators sometimes). Surgical masks do not form an airtight seal to the face and thus can't reliably prevent transmission. Achieving a tight fit with FFP masks is tricky and at least requires some practice. A

recent post

on LessWrong suggested the use of reusable masks with replaceable filters and body made out of silicone, such as this:

(

North 7700 Series Half Mask Air-Purifying Respirator

/ PD-USGOV-HHS-CDC)

These masks (also sometimes called respirators) are available in different sizes and can be equipped with filters of N99 / P3 standard. Safe usage should be much easier to achieve than with FFP masks due to the mask body having a flexible silicone edge that can form a tight seal with the face. Additionally, they are equipped with one-way valves that prevent the filters from being soaked by the wearers' breath. They are more expensive than the other mask types (~50$), but can be easily mass-produced using injection molding. Thus, widespread use of such masks seems highly desirable and might play a big part in reducing effective transmission rates without requiring severe social-distancing measures. Compared to the economic costs of these measures, the cost of providing these masks to everyone, at least in industrialized countries, seems to be negligible. (Much more detail can be found in the

previously mentioned post

.)

Call to action

Given the plausibility and potential benefit of the idea described above, it is urgent that we take action to promote it or figure out if it is wrong. I strongly encourage the readers of this post to:

Share the idea widely and try to convince influential people.
Buy a mask for yourself, friends, and family; wear them when you're in public (or generally close to people that you don't live with) to protect yourself and others and increase social acceptance.
Use 3D printers and share potential designs; distribute self-made masks to people in need of protective equipment.
Reach out to groups wh

...
Web Audio Echo?
by jefftk — 2020-04-19T02:30:02.144Z

Update 2020-04-19: This actually can be done fully in AudioWorklet: echo-demo-v2. Thanks stellartux!

The hello
world of audio processing is an echo:

def processAudio(samples):
return samples

You take a buffer of samples and then return them unmodified, echoing
the audio back out. For example, when I built my

bass whistle, that's where I started.

Today David and I were
trying to see if we could build my bucket-brigade singing idea in the
browser, and we couldn't find a fully worked echo example. I now have
something that works, but it's kind of silly and it seems like there
must be a better way.

The way I would expect this to work with the (new, experimental, not
supported everywhere yet) Web Audio API is that you write an
AudioWorklet. This is a way to set up JS to run off the main thread,
where number crunching won't block the UI and make the page
unresponsive. I'd like to attach the worklet's input to the
microphone, output to the speaker, and that would be it. Except, as
far as I can tell, there's no way to pipe the microphone directly to
an AudioWorklet.

To read audio samples from the user the
recommendation is to make a ScriptProcessorNode and
give it an audioprocess callback. This runs on the main
thread, though, and so when you look at MDN this is marked
as deprecated. It says to use AudioWorklet instead,
and I wish I could!

What I ended up doing was recording the audio on the main thread,
messaging that over to the worklet, and the having the worklet play
it. Here's a demo, which relies on experimental Web Audio features
that so far are only implemented in Blink-based browsers: echo-demo.

Comment via: facebook
Link Summary: Top 10 Replicated Findings from Behavioral Genetics
by ErickBall — 2020-04-19T01:32:43.000Z

This is a summary of the 10 findings in the paper Top 10 Replicated Findings from Behavioral Genetics (Plomin et al 2016). I posted this as a comment a while back, but now I'm making it a full post so I can find it again more easily.

The authors show that all of these have large effect sizes and are well replicated, except where noted below. I notice that the authors cite themselves a lot as support for many of these claims. I am not an expert in any of this, so if they're trying to pass off controversial ideas as widely accepted, I wouldn't be able to see through it.

1. Significant genetic influence is ubiquitous in cognitive and psychological traits. Intelligence has about 50% heritability. Twin studies show intelligence correlation about 0.85 in identical twins vs 0.6 in fraternal twins.

2. Although basically all psychological traits have some heritability (typically 30-50%) none of them have close to 100% heritability. Contrast this with physical traits like height, which has about 90% heritability.

3. Heritability of complex traits is caused by many genes of small effect that add up. Example: tendency for open-field activity in mice shows a linear response to selection pressure over 30 generations, rather than a clear separation that would occur if it were controlled by just a few genes. "Genome-wide association studies" look at hundreds of thousands or millions of nucleotides covering most of the genome to detect population associations between a single-nucleotide polymorphism and a trait. It generally finds that even the most significant genetic changes by themselves have tiny effects (far less than 1% of variation).

4. Correlations between traits are usually caused largely by genetics. For example, the strong correlation between types of intelligence (R=0.76 between reading and math) is due more to genetics than environment (the reading/math correlation is about 64% genetic). Anxiety and depression are correlated entirely for genetic reasons (they are affected by all the same genes). The schizophrenia/bipolar connection is largely genetic too, as is neuroticism/depression. Another finding (not yet replicated) is that the correlation of 0.3 between exercise behavior and attitudes toward exercise is 70% genetic; I interpret this to mean that most of the genetic influence on exercise behavior is caused by the influence ...
My dad got stung by a bee, and is mildly allergic. What are the tradeoffs involved in deciding whether to have him go the the emergency room?
by Eli Tyre — 2020-04-18T22:12:34.600Z

Facts:

My dad is 61, and reasonably healthy.
20 minutes ago, he got stung by a bee, on the ear.
When he's been stung (or bitten by ants) in the past, the area around the sting/bite has swollen considerably, but he has never gone into anaphylaxis.

However, I'm concerned that this situation has a larger risk of obstructing the airway, simply because the sting is on his head.

We removed the stinger within 5 minutes of being stung, and he took a dose of Diphenhydramine (Benadryl).
He lives in Maricopa, Arizona, US, where (according the the John Hopkins Cornavirus dashboard), there have been 2,491 total COVID-19 cases, and 70 deaths.

Questions:

Does anyone know of figure such as "If the patient starts do develop symptoms in their mouth or throat, their risk of full blow anaphylaxis is [X]%?"

I think that number in particular, is pretty crux-y.

Which resources should I be referring to.
How should I be weighing the risks of bringing him to the emergency room in light of the current pandemic?

[Update: it seems like the base-rate of anaphylaxis from bee stings is 3%, when anaphylaxis occurs, it usually starts within within a few minutes.

The key question I have left is if "large local swelling", can block the air ways when it the swelling is on the head or face.]

Thank you!

Eli
National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. (2019). Interim Report. Washington, DC: Author.
by JohnCDraper — 2020-04-18T08:54:32.714Z

"Developments in AI cannot be separated from the emerging strategic competition with China and developments in the broader geopolitical landscape. We are concerned that America’s role as the world’s leading innovator is threatened. We are concerned that strategic competitors and non-state actors will employ AI to threaten Americans, our allies, and our values. We know strategic competitors are investing in research and application. It is only reasonable to conclude that AI-enabled capabilities could be used to threaten our critical infrastructure, amplify disinformation campaigns, and wage war. China has deployed AI to advance an autocratic agenda and to commit human rights violations, setting an example that other authoritarian regimes will be quick to adopt and that will be increasingly difficult to counteract."
My stumble on COVID-19
by DirectedEvolution — 2020-04-18T04:32:30.987Z

A couple weeks ago, I started investigating the response, here and in the stock market, to COVID-19. I found that LessWrong's conversation took off about a week after the stock market started to crash. Given what we knew prior about COVID-19 prior to Feb. 20th, when the market first started to decline, I felt that the stock market's reaction was delayed. And of course, there'd been plenty of criticism of the response of experts and governments. But I was playing catch-up. I certainly was not screaming about COVID-19 until well after that time.

Today, I found the most detailed timeline I've seen of confirmed cases around the world. It goes day by day and country by country, from Jan. 13th to the end of March.

That timeline shows that Feb. 21st was the first date when at least 3 countries besides China had 10+ new confirmed cases in a single day (Japan, South Korea, Italy, and Iran).

That changes my interpretation of the stock market crash dramatically. Investors weren't failing to synthesize the early information or waiting for someone to yell "fire!" They were waiting to see confirmed international community spread, rather than just a few cases popping up here and there. Once they saw that early evidence, the sell-off began, and it continued in tandem, day by day, with the evidence of community spread in new countries and the exponential growth of COVID-19 cases in countries where it was already established.

Scott Aaronson speculates that he might have been able to tell what COVID-19 would turn into on Feb. 4th. I believed and agreed with him, hypothesizing that it was a lack of intellectual guideposts for synthesizing early information on a novel disease that made it hard to assess and act appropriately. To correct that lack, I created a model for what to look for and how to interpret information to judge the potential spread of a disease - an alarm bell for the next pandemic.

Now that I've found day-by-day, country-by-country confirmed case data, I need to change a few of my points of view.

First, is lack of confirmed international community spread generally a good reason to not panic, even if in this case things turned out badly? COVID-19 had its first confirmed case in the USA on Jan. 21st, but never had more than 1-2 new cases on any given day until Feb. 29th - with several days up to 12 days in between new cases during...
Helping the kids post
by jefftk — 2020-04-17T21:40:03.774Z

Sometimes I tell the kids "sorry, I can't do that with you right now,
I'm writing a blog post". A few months ago Lily (then 5y) came up to
me and asked if I would help her write a post. We sat down on the
couch, she dictated, I typed, and out came a

post about bridges. Since
then she's asked me to record

about a dozen more.

Some of the posts are fully initiated by her (podcasts) but other times
I'll ask if she'd like to write one with me. Perhaps we've just done
something interesting together (static and balloons),
or maybe she has something she wants to tell people about (tricky situations with my sister).

First she'll dictate the post body, then I'll ask about a title, then
I'll ask about colors. Sometimes her color preferences can be a bit
much, and I kind of regret learning the CSS for
polka-dotted backgrounds. I'll ask if she wants any pictures on
the post, and we'll either look through my photo archive or go take a
picture of something. I'll usually take pictures during activities if
I think there's a chance she'll want to use a picture in a post; at
some point that kind of anticipation will be her job, but not yet.

When it's done I'll date it and add it to the index page. Lily will often
ask me to post it in the Anna and
Lily Facebook group. Yesterday she wrote something and wanted to
post it to LessWrong so more
people would see it. I expected she wouldn't get the same kind of
reception there as on Facebook, but I helped her make an account. She
had trouble deciding what she wanted to write, though, and didn't end
up posting anything.

Her younger sister Anna has written several as well,
though her attention span is a lot shorter and the posts are less
coherent. She clearly misses her cousins a lot.

Comment via: facebook
Better name for "Heavy-tailedness of the world?"
by Daniel Kokotajlo — 2020-04-17T20:50:06.407Z

There is an important variable (or cluster of similar correlated variables) that I need a better name for. I also appreciate feedback on whether or not this variable is even a thing, and if so how I should characterize it. I have two possible names and two attempts at explaining it so far.

Name 1: "Heavy-tailedness of the world."

Name 2: "Great Man Theory vs. Psychohistory"

Attempt 1: Sometimes history hinges on the deliberate actions of small groups, or even individuals. Other times the course of history cannot be altered by anything any small group might do. Relatedly, sometimes potential impact of an individual or group follows a heavy-tailed distribution, and other times it doesn’t.

Some examples of things which could make the world heavier-tailed in this sense:

Currently there are some domains in which humans are similar in effectiveness (e.g. manual labor, voting) and others in which the distribution is heavy-tailed, such that most of the total progess/influence comes from a small fraction of individuals (e.g. theoretical math, donating to political parties). Perhaps in the future history will hinge more on what happens in the second sort of domain.
Transformative technologies, such that when, where, and how they appear matters a lot.
Such technologies being unknown to most people, governments, and corporations, such that competition over them is limited to the few who forsee their importance.
Wealth inequality and political inequality concentrating influence in fewer people.
Technologies such as brain-machine interfaces, genetic engineering, and wireheading increasing inequality in effectiveness and influentialness.

Attempt 2: Consider these three fictional worlds; I claim they form a spectrum, and it's important for us to figure out where on this spectrum our world is:

World One: How well the future goes depends on how effectively world governments regulate advanced AI. The best plan is to contribute to the respected academic literature on what sorts of regulations would be helpful while also doing activism and lobbying to convince world governments to pay attention to the literature.

World Two: How well the future goes depends on whether the first corporation to build AGI obeys proper safety protocols or not in the first week or so after they build it. Which safety protocols work is a hard problem which requires unusually smar...
My Covid-19 Thinking: 4/17
by Zvi — 2020-04-17T19:50:01.710Z

Epistemic Status: Even farther out of my supposed expertise than previous Covid-19 posts.

A little over a week ago I started writing up my general thinking about Covid-19. I then ended up pulling out from that post first The One Mistake Rule and then Seemingly Popular Covid-19 Model is Obvious Nonsense. I did not get back to finishing the post, and it’s now been a week.

In Covid-19 terms, a week is a long time. Rather than continue where I left off, I’ll restart and change styles. The goal here is to get thoughts down on paper and share them, in hopes they are useful, and not lose too much more to the huge speed premium these days. Can always follow up later.

This is built upon the same type of thinking as On R0 and Taking Initial Viral Load Seriously. Its conclusions are broadly consistent with On R0.

If anything, the past week has been surprisingly unsurprising. I would characterize what we have seen this past week as mostly the good news we would have expected given there was going to be good news, plus a large reporting bump around Easter.

All the numbers are terrible and unreliable and flirt with being meaningless. But the numbers also mostly fit together at this point into a coherent story of what is happening.

This post is an attempt to lay out what I think is happening, and likely to happen, and explain the thinking behind that. I’ve laid it out in conversations with many people I trust, and incorporated their models and feedback. I mostly seem to be able to convince these people that my picture is broadly reasonable.

This is not intended as a proof of any kind, nor am I going to attempt to provide all the sources that shaped my conclusions – better to get the information out there than to let perfect be the enemy of the good. Early on I did the opposite, kept quiet, and that was clearly a mistake.

How I Read Data at This Point

Different people have different views on what data is accurate, what data is meaningful, and what data is useless.

My starting assumption is that essentially no one is outright lying or putting down imaginary numbers. When you see a number it is the product of a process that observes something in the physical world and reports back. That does not mean that the number means what it says it means.

We know that the number of positive test results, on its own, not very useful once you have other data. Positive test numbers, on their own, p...
COVID-19: An opportunity to help by modelling testing and tracing to inform the UK government
by JustinShovelain — 2020-04-17T17:21:48.656Z

Tim Colbourn, a leading UK epidemiologist, is looking for help with modelling the effectiveness of testing and tracing for COVID-19, along with comparing its effect and cost to other interventions. He has composed a document in order to suggest that a form of testing and tracing be implemented by the UK government: "PTTI: A Population-wide Testing, contact Tracing and Isolation strategy for the UK", [Tim Colbourn et al., 2020] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vTr4IhVdfr5e-CcDfqgv3zjP-Da1Qh5bas09UHsGODU/edit

The economic case for PTTI is clear: at a cost of £33.6bn over 2yrs, it averts an estimated 271,000 deaths (£124,000 per death averted), 541,000 intensive care unit (ICU) cases, 812,000 hospitalizations, and 34,600,000 Covid-19 cases. These represent £18.0 billion in saved costs for the NHS. There are an additional £8.1 billion in prevented productivity losses due to illness and lockdown. Then there are all the other costs of lockdown not included (Table 4). For the next version we hope to have more detailed models, and include more alternative scenarios e.g. PTTI without the testing i.e. population-wide clinical case identification, contact tracing and isolation (PTTI), face masks, and even a managed herd immunity strategy for comparison. We welcome input from those interested!

Currently, at least in the UK, government appointed modellers are not modelling any alternatives to intermittent lockdown and herd immunity. No other groups seem to be publishing such models either (with the partial exception of the paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.09861.pdf, which is going to be published in updated form soon). There are also some other modelling directions that can be explored, which haven’t yet been explored in the models governments are using:

Including the spatial dimension to account for the clustered nature of transmission and local hotspots
Doing economic cost benefit like decision analysis so we can know how beneficial various policies are in comparison to each other
Modelling other things like the public use of facemasks, or highly effective drugs becoming available

This is an opportunity to improve how the UK government controls the spread of COVID-19 after lockdown has ended by helping model the implementation and effects of testing and tracing. This may also help other governments if they follow the UK’s lead ...
How much motivation do you derive from curiosity alone in your work/research?
by  — 2020-04-17T14:04:13.763Z

A recent discussion of curiosity prompted me to start wondering about the importance of curiosity as a factor in research. Most people seem to agree that curiosity is a useful intrinsic motivator for research at the macro level. And discussions I've seen make a strong case for curiosity working better as a motivation for research at the macro-level than other potential motivators - status, prestige, etc. But, every time I read or think about this, I've felt this nagging unease that I only just managed to pinpoint the source of. My unease comes from my uncertainty about how much curiosity can drive act as a single source of motivation to do day-to-day work in the absence of "discipline".

Personally, as I mentioned in a comment on this post, I haven't found that curiosity on its provides sufficient motivation for me to continue making progress on work day after day. Even for work I'm genuinely interested in, there tend to be parts that are more and less interesting, so I still need to employ daily scheduling to make continuous progress.

However, I'm a nobody, and famous thinkers like Richard Feynman talk about how they're motivated by the pleasure of finding things out and getting unstuck by playing. I love Feynman as much as the next person, but am wary of over-updating on his example or the public persona of any eminent thinker for that matter.

So instead, I'm curious to hear from people here: how much are you able to motivate yourself day-to-day via curiosity? Does this motivation substitute for scheduling / planning or complement it? Bonus points for discussing what your work tends to be and whether there are certain parts of it that you are more / less motivated to by curiosity.