trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
How the Moderna vaccine works, and a note about mRNA vaccines
by masasin — 2020-11-17T17:22:47.384Z

Epistemic status: Not an expert. Pretty confident I have it right. Incorporated feedback from commenters, and asking for more. List of edits at the end.

What the Moderna vaccine does is it contains a piece of code (RNA) which asks your body to create a protein that is very similar to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (which it uses to attach to your cells), but modified in such a way that it is more stable, and doesn't change shape. Otherwise, the easiest place for the antibody to identify and attach to the protein gets hidden by the rest of the structure. Your body then says, "Hey, that's something new! Let's attack it!" and tries out a bunch of different things.

A difference with the mRNA vaccines is that there are no viral particles. The only thing it contains are the code (plus other code that doesn't get used to generate things, but are useful in keeping the rest of the code stable). The amount of RNA you get in your two shots would be all that's needed, and your body doesn't make extra strands of RNA that would ask for more spike proteins. In other words, you only get a protein that exists on the shell of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and not there virus itself, so there is zero risk of infection.

Side effects are minimal. Less than 2% of the people get a fever, and most don't even have a headache. Just some muscle pain etc near the injection site. However, according to a commenter (see precog's comment below), there are some disadvantages, including the possibility that, while it might prevent disease, it might not prevent infection and transmission. Also, the lipids that hold the RNA might generate an immune response as well.

The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine works slightly differently, but it's a similar idea. Have RNA code to produce the antigen to get an antibody response. It uses the same stabilization modification, which was discovered by Jason McLellan's lab in collaboration with the NIH.

These two are the first ever mRNA vaccines. mRNA vaccines are very modular, as well as easy to change and modify; most labs would be able to make their own vaccines with machines they already have. I've been following Moderna for a few years, and they were working on a MERS vaccine in the past. 4 days after the SARS-COV-2 genome was uploaded, they'd decided which sections they want to use, and which edits needed to be made, and they started manufacturing it (not mass production) lite...
Comparing Covid and Tobacco
by Tim Liptrot — 2020-11-17T16:13:57.715Z

Tobacco kills 5 million people every year [1]. Covid probably won't pass 5 million this year regardless of our policies or behavior. And yet, Covid has been the focus of far greater scarce political attention than Tobacco. We have accepted an increase of 150 million people in global severe poverty and the trillions in economic damage to prevent Covid deaths. Tobacco eradication has received far less attention. What do you think are the biggest reasons for this difference?

Covid is new, people over-react to new threats.

Covid affects the most politically organized and powerful world demographics: Old people in rich countries. Tobacco affects poor old people in poor countries.

Covid is more tractable than Tobacco (the cost of preventing a Covid death is lower than preventing a Tobacco death). This seems unlikely, but I'm open to an argument.

The tax incentives cause governments to neglect the Tobacco problem.

People individually do not mind staying at home and watching Netflix. They therefore share/read/write more about Covid.

The world's policy elite knows people with Covid but knows very few tobacco addicts in Lebanon or China.

Policy Elite believes people can rationally decide to consume tobacco (hurt themselves) but not decide to social distance (hurt others)

The Covid attention results from a massive availability cascade. Once an issue becomes available enough to the policy elite, it's salience is self-reinforcing.

Individuals can affect Covid but organizing Tobacco policy NGO's for developing countries is a more complicated model.

Thoughts?

WHO (World Health Organization). 2012b. ‘‘Why Tobacco Is a Public Health Priority.’’
www.who.int/tobacco/health_priority/en/.
Writing to think
by Adam Zerner — 2020-11-17T07:54:44.523Z

There are a lot of things that I want to write blog posts about. I find myself feeling like I have something useful to say about a topic, and I want to say it. But when I actually sit down to get started, I run into problems.

Sometimes I don't know how to explain what I want to say.
Sometimes -- no, quite often, I can explain it reasonably well abstractly, but I can't think of good, concrete examples, and without those the post doesn't feel good enough to be worth posting.
Sometimes the subject matter feels like it's not important enough.
Sometimes I feel like I'm on to something, but the subject matter is something I only have an amateur's understanding of, I don't want to make noob mistakes in the post, but I also don't want to spend the time doing the research. Or maybe I still have trouble understanding it even after I do the research.
Sometimes I just question whether or not my idea is actually a good one.

There's an insight I learned from Paul Graham in The Age of the Essay that I think addresses all of this. A lot of people want to collect their thoughts first before starting the process of putting them down on paper. To address all of the hesitations I mention above before getting started. You don't want to publish something that has these issues, so you may as well resolve them before you start writing, right? Seems pretty logical.

Here's the problem though. The act of writing can help you to resolve the issues. Actually, that's a huge understatement: it's enormously helpful. Someone who writes in this exploratory sense has a huge leg up on someone who tries to resolve the issues in their head. It's almost like trying to solve an algebra problem in your head vs. with paper and pencil. Writing seems to have a way of boosting your IQ by 20 points.

Here's an interesting thought that's never occurred to me before. There are various bloggers/writers who I keep up with: Scott Alexander, Robin Hanson, Paul Graham, Tim Urban. They're all smart and have lots of great ideas. I've always assumed that in order to be a good writer like them that you have to be smart and have good ideas first. Ie. that it's a prerequisite. But what if it's the opposite? What if they're smart and have good ideas because they spend a lot of time writing? Maybe the arrow of causality is reversed. Strictly speaking, I'm presenting a false dichotomy here. It's not one or the other. But I susp...
Notes on Honor
by David Gross — 2020-11-17T05:25:03.739Z

This post examines the virtue of honor. I mean to explore what other people have learned about this virtue, rather than to express my own opinions about it, though I’ve been selective about what I found interesting or credible, according to my own inclinations. I wrote this not as an expert, but as someone who wants to learn. I hope it helps people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.

What is honor?

“The one who is conscious of his soul’s nobility will not endure a dishonorable life.” ―Sophocles

The concept of honor is used in several ways, including:

Honor as a package of other virtues.
I tend to think of honor as a sort of composite virtue, made up of things like dignity, integrity, righteousness, ambition, and a sense of shame. I have a difficult time imagining it as an independent virtue of the sort you might try to improve in isolation. A person might dishonor themself, or their family, or their profession, by flagrantly violating any one of a set of virtues. In other contexts, “honor” is a euphemism for one particular virtue: a young woman in an old novel who “defends her honor” is really defending her chastity; when you address a judge as “your honor” you’re hoping to get the message through to the virtue of justice in particular.
Honor as a high standard of behavior.
When a boy scout says, “and that’s the truth: scout’s honor” he is asserting that he takes his pledge of honesty more seriously than the typical person, because of an additional honor code he feels bound by. Sometimes this facet goes by the name “rectitude.” Someone who hews to a supererogatory or role-based code of conduct (like a Code of Chivalry, Omertà, or the Hippocratic Oath) is honorable in this way.
Some honor codes include “non-toleration clauses” (for example, “I will not cheat, nor will I tolerate those who do.”) These show that you are holding yourself and others to a higher than ordinary standard.
Honor as extraordinary investment in one’s character.
An honorable person may be defined as someone who strongly values his or her character, such that they will go to great lengths to avoid doing anything vicious or shameful. Sometimes this facet is called “pride” (or in an inverted way, “a sense of shame”), “character,” or “dignity.”
Honor as public standing or reputation.
One sense of honor means something like “unusual sensitivity to one’s

...
Debug Headers with GET
by jefftk — 2020-11-17T03:10:05.949Z

HTTP offers a convenient way to download only the headers: send a HEAD
request:

$ telnet www.example.com 80
Trying 93.184.216.34...
Connected to www.example.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Encoding: gzip
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Age: 325063
Cache-Control: max-age=604800
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2020 02:29:50 GMT
Etag: "3147526947"
Expires: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 02:29:50 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 07:18:26 GMT
Server: ECS (dcb/7F82)
X-Cache: HIT
Content-Length: 648

Of course you wouldn't usually manually type into

telnet,
you'd use something like

curl:

$ curl -I http://www.example.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Age: 326121
Cache-Control: max-age=604800
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2020 02:47:38 GMT
Etag: "3147526947"
Expires: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 02:47:38 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 07:18:26 GMT
Server: ECS (dcb/7EC9)
X-Cache: HIT
Content-Length: 1256

It's defined in

RFC 7231:

The HEAD method is identical to GET except that the
server MUST NOT send a message body in the response (i.e., the
response terminates at the end of the header section). The server
SHOULD send the same header fields in response to a HEAD request as it
would have sent if the request had been a GET, except that the payload
header fields MAY be omitted.

Unfortunately, HEAD is a trap. When you are trying to debug strange
server behavior, it is much safer to send GET requests and throw away
the body (ex, ex). Not only is "SHOULD" just a recommendation, but even if
this were a "MUST" you could bet some servers would mishandle
it. Counterfactuals are hard!

While differences are rare, always debugging by requesting the body
like a normal client would, and then discarding it, means one fewer
way that your debug request differs from a real one:

$ curl -sS -D- -o/dev/null http://www.example.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Age: 326124
Cache-Control: max-age=604800
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2020 02:47:41 GMT
Etag: "3147526947"
Expires: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 02:47:41 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 07:18:26 GMT
Server: ECS (dcb/7EC9)
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Cache: HIT
Content-Length: 1256

Going farther in the same direction, it's even better to start with
"Copy as cURL":

And then ...
Solomonoff Induction and Sleeping Beauty
by ike — 2020-11-17T02:28:59.793Z

Various people have said that Solomonoff Induction (SI) accords with the Self-Sampling Assumption (SSA) more than the Self-Indicating Assumption (SIA). See these posts and the comments on them:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/omqnrTRnHs3pSYef2/down-with-solomonoff-induction-up-with-the-presumptuous

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sEij9C9MnzEs8kaBc/the-presumptuous-philosopher-self-locating-information-and

I was surprised, because I like both SI and SIA. Both seem correct to me, and I carefully considered the apparent contradiction. I believe that I have dissolved the contradiction, and that SI, properly applied, actually implies SIA. I can't actually prove this broad claim, but I will at least argue that SI is a thirder in Sleeping Beauty, and gesture in the direction of what I think is wrong with the claims in the linked post. As a bonus, if you read till the end I'll throw in an intuition-generator for why SIA actually gives the correct answer in Presumptuous Philosopher.

First, let me reconstruct the contradiction in the Sleeping Beauty context, and explain why it might seem that SI is a halfer.

Naive view:

There are three possible outcomes: Monday-Tails (MT), Monday-Heads (MH) and Tuesday-Heads (TH). Each of these three outcomes are equally simple, therefore the machines encoding each will get equal weighting and the probabilities are all 1/3.

Antithesis:

MT is actually simpler than MH. Why? Because if you know that it was heads, you still need to be told that it's Monday - but if you know that it's tails, then you already know that it's Monday. MT is one bit simpler than MH and therefore is twice as likely, under SI. SI is a halfer. Note that this is roughly the same argument as in the Presumptuous Philosopher post - it takes more information to encode "where you are" if there's many copies of you.

Synthesis:

Wait a minute. By equivalent logic, TH is simpler than MH - if you know that it's Tuesday, you automatically know that it was heads! TH is then equal to MT, but MH still seems more complicated - to "locate" it you need two bits of info.

The core insight needed to solve this puzzle is that there's two different ways to encode MH - either "it's Monday and also heads", or "it's heads and also Monday". So each of those encodings are more complicated by one bit than the other options, but there's twice as many such encodings. In...
The Darwin Game - Rounds 10 to 20
by lsusr — 2020-11-17T01:14:05.190Z

MeasureBot maintains its lead.

Rounds 10-20

Everything so far

Today's Obituary

Bot
Team
Summary
Round

Silly Random Invert Bot 2-3
NPCs
Returns 2 or 4 on the first round. Returns 5 - <opponents_last_move> on subsequent rounds.
10

Silly 3 Bot
NPCs
Always returns 3.
10

CooperateBot [Larks]
Chaos Army
"For the first 10 turns: return 3. For all subsequent turns: return the greater of 3 and (5 - the maximum value they have ever submitted)"
10

Silly Cement Bot 2
NPCs
Returns 2 on the first turn. Otherwise, returns 5 - opponent_first_move.
12

Silly Counter Invert Bot
NPCs
Starts by randomly playing 2 or 3. Then always returns 5 -opponent_previous_move.
12

Silly Invert Bot 5
NPCs
Returns 5 on the first round. Returns 5 - <opponents_last_move> on subsequent rounds.
12

Silly Cement Bot 3
NPCs
Returns 3 on the first turn. Otherwise, returns 5 - opponent_first_move.
14

Silly Cement Bot 2-3
NPCs
Returns 2 or 3 on the first turn. Otherwise, returns 5 - opponent_first_move.
14

Silly Invert Bot 3
NPCs
Returns 3 on the first round. Returns 5 - <opponents_last_move> on subsequent rounds.
15

Silly Invert Bot 4
NPCs
Returns 4 on the first round. Returns 5 - <opponents_last_move> on subsequent rounds.
17

Random-start-turn-taking
Chaos Army
Selects 3 or 2 randomly until symmetry is broken. Then oscillates between 2 and 3.
17

This alternate timeline will conclude on November 20, at 5 pm Pacific Time.
Propinquity Cities So Far
by mako yass — 2020-11-16T23:12:52.065Z

Finding alternatives to war can save a lot of money

Summary

In any dense city, lots of people will be struggling to occupy the same set of spaces. To function, cities need to have some systematic way of resolving those positioning conflicts, a method for deciding who gets to go where. The methods we use now for resolving positioning conflicts (land markets and rent) have a lot of overhead that is both very obviously overhead and also overlooked as inevitable. I talk about that extensively, and some of its unexamined costs. I present an outline of what looks like a better method, Propinquity Optimization (proq), which resolves positioning conflicts at minimal cost, enabling a much higher maximum quality of life in dense cities.

It feels urgently needed, to me. I am not sure whether it is the most urgently needed thing that I can be working on (I'm also responsible for this humanization of recommender systems/harmonization of global discourses and.. some other stuff). There's some discussion of its global importance in the Longtermist Significance section.

In the course of this, I also discuss quite a lot of the problems in applied preference aggregation and some potentially novel ways to resolve some of them. Even if you aren't interested in building better cities, you might want to read it just to see an instance of applied utilitarianism as a legal mechanism. I think that aspect of it is really pretty neat.

A Propinquity City assigns services and residents to whatever proposed locations optimize an aggregation of the preference expressions of the residents.

Motivation

In dense cities, even once housing supply has exceeded demand, most city dwellers will still have rent extracted from them to a significant proportion of their income: Dense living means that demand within the urban center doesn't ever drop. You can maybe get arbitrarily cheap housing in some incredibly sparsely populated outskirts, but not in the dense part. There seem to be levels of affordability that are firmly unreachable under the kinds of land allocation methods we use now.
When we notice that there seem to be firm and significant limits on how cheaply a technology can ever come to operate, even at its peak, smart buyers start looking for alternatives.

Price competition happens when competitors with high prices can be, in some way, outrun, by competitors with low prices. That just doesn't happen...
How can labour productivity growth be an indicator of automation?
by Polytopos — 2020-11-16T21:16:03.576Z

I was listening to an interview with the economist Paul Krugman the other day about whether robots will be taking our jobs. He pointed to data showing that the growth in productivity has declined in recent years, citing this as evidence that AI and robotics are not (yet at least) going to be automating away many jobs.

This puzzled me a little and led me to do a bit of research into the economists definition of productivity (specifically what they call labour productivity). I'm no expert on economics so this is just my best attempt.
Labour productivity is calculated by a simple formula:
Market Value Produced / Hours worked
So if your economy produces $100 in 10 hours the labour productivity is 10 $/h.
What struck me as odd was that Krugman's analysis didn't seem to take into account the interaction between this productivity measure and reduced prices due to automation. Suppose a given market is producing $100 by selling 10 units at $10 per unit for 10 hours of labour. If automation allows us to produce 100 times more units with fewer hours of labour at first glance it seems like a no-brainer that his should increase labour productivity. But suppose that demand is not elastic, then the ability to produce 100 times more units with similar variable costs means that the price will fall dramatically. So now, the value of the market produced is much less (i.e., 10 units times a much lower price). Thus even though it takes many fewer working hours to produce the goods, the value of the goods has also fallen.

Since both the denominator and the numerator would fall as a result of large scale automation, why does Krugman suggest that rising labour productivity would be the main indicator of whether large scale automation is happening in the economy? Is there some additional assumption economists are making when they make such claims? (e.g., that demand for goods is infinitely elastic)
Extortion beats brinksmanship, but the audience matters
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2020-11-16T21:13:18.822Z

EDIT: The terms "extortion" and "brinksmanship" used in this post don't fully map onto the real-world uses of the term, but are the closest to the concepts I'm trying to point to.

Extortion, simplified, is:

"Give me something I want or I'll hurt you (even if that costs me something too)".

Brinksmanship is more like:

"Offer me something I want, or I'll blow up our deal and hurt you (even if that costs me something too)".

Written that way, the two sound very similar. Indeed, I've argued that there is little difference between extortion and trade offers, apart from the "default point".

So why am I claiming that these two are different, and that extortion is much more powerful? Because of a key difference in the default point: the outside audience.

How the audience reacts

Extortion audience

Suppose I am extorting someone; maybe I'm a blackmailer with naughty photos, a mafia offering "protection", or the roman empire demanding tribute. The problem for me is to make my threat credible: to show I will go through with the threat, even if that is risky or expensive for me to do so.

Suppose I have twenty targets that need to convince that I'm serious. Then if one of them resists, this is exactly what I need. I will publish their photos/burn down their shop/invade their territory. My threat is credible, because I've just shown that I will carry it out; this keeps the other nineteen targets in line. Indeed, I might actively want one target to resist; that way, I pay the expenses of one threat carried out, but get full compliance from the other nineteen, rather than getting twenty sets of grudging partial compliances.

This makes resisting extortion very tricky. Suppose you were the target of my extortion, and suppose that you had made it a principle to never give in to threats. And suppose that you had credibly demonstrated that principle. If we two are the only people around, then there's no advantage to me carrying out my threats[1].

But if there are other people in the audience, I still would want to hurt you if you don't give in. It's not about you; I want to credibly demonstrate I will carry out my threats. Indeed, carrying out my threats against you might be the best move on my part; I've shown I will carry them out, even when it arguably makes no sense to do so.

Brinksmanship audience

Now let's compare that with brinksmanship. Suppose I'm setting out the conditions...