trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Authorities and Amateurs
by jefftk — 2020-03-25T03:40:02.208Z

People are writing a lot about the coronavirus, and I've seen a lot of
pushback on how pieces often haven't been written by
people with epidemiology or public health credentials. For example,

Flatten
the Curve of Armchair Epidemiology,

Listen To Actual
Experts On Coronavirus, and comments like

this
one. The argument that we should be listening to experts and not
random people would make a lot of sense if the "armchair" folks didn't
keep being right.

Let's look at the articles they're criticizing for having non-expert
authors:

Coronavirus:
Act Today or People Will Die (3/10): Argues that we need to get everyone
to stay home immediately.

Cancel
Everything (3/10): Argues essentially the same point.

Flattening
The Curve Is a Deadly Delusion (3/13): Argues that our medical
capacity is so much lower than the likely peak that we need an
immediate lockdown and a renewed focus on containment.

With two weeks of perspective, however, these articles were exactly
right. They clearly laid out the case for decisive action, and if we
had followed their prescriptions more closely we would be in much
better shape right now.

This goes beyond a few articles, however. All the aspects of this
crisis that have involved planning more than a couple weeks out have
been very poorly handled:

People weren't told to stock up on food so that they'd be able to
reduce trips outdoors, and so that they'd have food in case they
were quarantined for 2+ weeks. Stores weren't told to prepare for
a rush. A government that was on top of things could have started
advocating this in early February in an "if you can afford to"
way. This would have spread people's buying over a longer period
and avoided the empty shelves we see now. Instead, once
restaurants were closing and people realized that they could be
quarantined at any time, everyone simultaneously tried to buy
weeks worth of ingredients and we had widespread shortages of
basic goods starting in mid March.

Hospitals weren't told (or allowed?) to ration personal
protective equipment such as masks until they had shortages. The
CDC didn't publish guidelines for sanitization and reuse, and
start telling people to conserve. In weeks of handling initial
cases, hospitals burned through amounts that would have lasted
months with careful rationing.

...
March 22nd & 23rd: Coronavirus Link Updates
by habryka — 2020-03-25T01:08:14.499Z

Update: We just launched a new version of our link database. We now have over 350 links categorized in total, and the database is now properly integrated into LessWrong and even works on mobile!

You can find the full database here:

https://www.lesswrong.com/coronavirus-link-database

As part of the LessWrong Coronavirus Link Database, Ben, Elizabeth and I are publishing update posts with all the new links we are adding each day that we ranked a 3 or above in our importance rankings. Here are all the top links that we added over the last two days (March 22nd and 23rd), by topic.

Aggregators

Sources of state and local legal info (USA)

Collection of resources to follow specific states, and a spreadsheet of each state's current, uh, state in regard to C19

Financial Times C19 Coverage

Rob Wiblin describes FT's coverage of C19 as ahead of the curve and worth paying for

(EV): I can't verify this as I'm not yet paying for FT coverage

Chinese language version of Quora on COVID

Chinese Q&A site discussing Covid.

(RS) Interesting to see general day to day activity and response to international news from the Chinese mainland perspective. Lots of thought provoking questions being discussed.

Dashboards

Current state of states and localities (USA)

Columns like "contacts", "executive orders", "travel restrictions"

Map of tests per capita by country

Worldwide map with countries colored by testing per capita, with exact counts in a table

Economics

Cost of coronavirus reaction

Two approaches to calculating how much the money lost from the economy due to shutdowns could have saved lives

(EV) Starts with the current death count, no projected uncontrolled death count, which is a terrible sign. Leaves out lives saved for non-C19 reasons from shut downs (via e.g. polllution and reduced driving)

Diagnostics briefing

22 page doc on the current state of C19 testing and what you need to know to make decisions to increase it

Medical System

Census of USA hospital resources

Society for Critical Care Medicine's newly conducted census of US ICU beds, vents, and other medical resources. Staffing strategies to cope with overload

Virologist explains why vaccine may be possible

Virologist/investor explains why people are unnecessarily pessimistic about creating a vaccine for C19.

Standards for a minimally acceptable ventilator

This is a specification of the minimally (and some preferred options) clinically accepta

...
Advice on reducing other risks during Coronavirus?
by  — 2020-03-24T23:30:37.172Z

I've seen tons of great, useful advice on reducing coronavirus risk, and prepping for the fallout. What I haven't seen is advice on reducing other day-to-day risks which would be unexpectedly dangerous (due to strained infrastructure, reduced medical capacity, etc) during the current period. Some obvious suggestions might include:

If you have to drive, do so more slowly and defensively than usual. Try to walk places (while not looking at your phone) if you can.
Don't operate power tools.
Don't do anything involving significant heights.
Be extra careful cooking (burns) and cleaning (chemicals), and handling things like glasses or knives that might cut you if they slip or break.

What other suggestions do people have?
Announcement: LessWrong Coronavirus Links Database 2.0
by Ben Pace — 2020-03-24T22:07:29.162Z

There is a massive amount of information and discussion about the coronavirus, and it can be challenging to keep track of all the things coming in from different sources.

To combat that, 11 days ago we announced that the LessWrong team built and is maintaining a database with all the links that we think are useful, categorizing them, summarizing them, and sorting them.

We've just built a major update for the database. Originally it was a Google spreadsheet but we have now integrated it into the LessWrong site proper and improved the information structure.

You can find the new version at lesswrong.com/coronavirus-link-database. It looks like this:

The database now has 360 links.

And on mobile it looks like this:

We publish daily updates of the added links (here's the most recent one) and you can get notification of those by going to Habryka's profile page and subscribing to his posts.

How to Contribute to the Database

You can submit links using the

Link Submission Form

, which is also findable from the Link Database page itself. This is the primary way to help out.

If you would like to put in the time to help maintain this database, you can help us with the data entry work using the more detailed

LWC19 Database Data Entry Form

, which takes ~5 mins to fill out per link (varying time depending on the link). If you submit 5 links this way, we'll reach out to thank you and give you better access to the database.

If you'd like to help out further with the LessWrong response to the coronavirus, here is my post on 3 low-key ways to help out.

Thank you to the following awesome people who submitted link: Jess Reidel, Ray Arnold, Justin Shovelain, Shri Samson, Jeffrey Ladish, Kyle, Christopher Paul, Roman, VillainMaterial, Sarira, romeostevensit, Jacob Lagerros, ESRogs, Ruby, William-Jose Velez, Matthew Hollett, silverdrake11, Erik Willekens, Eugene Esca, Rod, Vincent Lau, Naryan Wong.
How to Contribute to the Coronavirus Response on LessWrong
by Ben Pace — 2020-03-24T22:04:30.956Z

The LessWrong team is currently focusing full-time on the coronavirus (

Why?

). We’ve made some pretty big asks with open questions like The LessWrong Research Agenda, and we’re super appreciative of everyone who’s participated and generally written really useful lit reviews and data analyses. But there are smaller ways to help as well. In order to shrink the barrier to entry as much as possible, here are three suggestions for Minimum Viable Help:

Add a link to the LessWrong Coronavirus Link Database.
Leave a comment with a link relevant to ongoing coronavirus discussion.
Help proofread someone's post/comment before they post it.

Last updated: 23rd March. I will update this page as more opportunities arise.

1. Add to the LessWrong Coronavirus Link Database

We built a daily-updating database of links about the coronavirus. We've just moved it from Google Sheets to LessWrong.com so better analytics are incoming, but from looking at the google sheet I believe the database is getting traffic within a factor of 5 of LessWrong's total traffic (LW typically has ~60 active users at any given moment of the day).

The current page on "Progression & Outcome".

Habryka, Elizabeth and I have been updating it daily for the past week. It currently has 306 links, organised into sections including "Spread & Prevention", "Work & Donate" and "Dashboards", ranked from 1 to 5 on how important we think that they are.

The goal of this database is to make it easy to find important information. Some examples of questions it can help you answer:

"What's the best dashboard to follow global case counts?"
"What's the best link to send to my parents?"
"How long does COVID-19 last on different material surfaces?"
"Where can I find that really good thread by Rob Wiblin I read last week?"

You can help out by entering links into the

Link Submission Form

.

It just has 3 entries: the URL, where you found it, and who you are (so we can thank people later). We processing links every day, so expect to see it added tomorrow. Please add any links you personally find valuable like papers, news articles, tweets and facebook posts. If you're not sure whether a link is valuable err on the side of inclusion and one of us will sort it out.

If you'd like to get daily updates of the links we have, Habryka's account publishes daily lists of the most important links (scoring 3+), and you can subscri

...
Adding Up To Normality
by orthonormal — 2020-03-24T21:53:03.339Z

Related: Leave a Line of Retreat, Living In Many Worlds

"It all adds up to normality." Greg Egan, Quarantine

You're on an airplane at 35,000 feet, and you strike up a conversation about aerodynamic lift with the passenger in your row. Things are going along just fine until they point out to you that your understanding of lift is wrong, and that planes couldn't fly from the effect you thought was responsible.

Should you immediately panic in fear that the plane will plummet out of the sky?

Obviously not; clearly the plane has been flying just fine up until now, and countless other planes have flown as well. There has to be something keeping the plane up, even if it's not what you thought, and even if you can't yet figure out what it actually is. Whatever is going on, it all adds up to normality.

Yet I claim that we often do this exact kind of panicked flailing when there's a challenge to our philosophical or psychological beliefs, and that this panic is entirely preventable.

I've experienced and/or seen this particular panic response when I, or others, encounter good arguments for propositions including

My religion is not true. ("Oh no, then life and morality are meaningless and empty!")
Many-worlds makes the most sense. ("Oh no, then there are always copies of me doing terrible things, and so none of my choices matter!")
Many "altruistic" actions actually have hidden selfish motives. ("Oh no, then altruism doesn't exist and morality is pointless!")
I don't have to be the best at something in order for it to be worth doing. ("Oh no, then others won't value me!") [Note: this one is from therapy; most people don't have the same core beliefs they're stuck on.]

(I promise these are not in fact strawmen. I'm sure you can think of your own examples. Also remember that panicking over an argument in this way is a mistake even if the proposition turns out to be false.)

To illustrate the way out, let's take the first example. It took me far too long to leave my religion, partly because I was so terrified about becoming a nihilist if I left that I kept flinching away from the evidence. (Of course, the religion proclaimed itself to be the origin of morality, and so it reinforced the notion that anyone else claiming to be moral was just too blind to see that the...
How do you study a math textbook?
by Rudi C — 2020-03-24T18:43:56.815Z

My own personal routine:

I start reading, whenever I feel there is a problem presented in the text (mostly theorems and examples but sometimes questions arise in the text itself), I’ll try solving it. I invest time in this endeavor proportionally to my belief that it can be solved in a reasonable amount of time. If this time runs out, I’ll start reading a little of the solution and trying again. I usually postpone the end-of-chapter exercises to “later” because of spaced repetition and lack of time (I have to have studied a certain amount of chapters for exams so I have to prioritize the quantity.). Sometimes interesting ideas/quasi-problems/ways of looking at things come to mind during the study, and I think on them as well.

When I’m solving a problem, I’ll usually walk around and try to solve it mentally, because I have this uncertain belief that if my math needs paper and pencil, then I can hardly use it “at will.” I’m the kind of person who forgets stuff and needs to repeatedly derive them from first principles when needed, and I can’t quite do that if those derivations rely on writing stuff out. (I also hate memorizing theorems. It feels stupid. :D )

By the way, if the solution is not in the text and I’m stumped, I websearch around. I hate the professors who give grades for the text’s problems and thus disincentiviz solution manuals economically and socially. These take-home exercises correlate more with people’s social skills and network than their effort or knowledge. Quizzing people instead is a much better choice.
SARS-CoV-2, 19 times less likely to infect people under 15
by George3d6 — 2020-03-24T18:10:58.113Z
Link: https://blog.cerebralab.com/SARS-CoV-2,_19_times_less_likely_to_infect_people_under_15

Is a small volume of low quality data sufficient for making meaningful claims about CFR and R0 ?

Epistemic Status: Wild off-the-cuff speculation

Note: This post was written on 24-03-2020 during the srars-cov-2 pandemic

DISCLAIMER !

This is NOT an article claiming that we should stop caring about the covid-19 pandemic, nor is it claiming that the number presented in the title is actually correct, rather, it’s a punny attempt to show the kind of data-driven uncertainty that leads to us not fully understanding the behavior of the disease in terms of spread and frequency of symptoms.

If you wish to crucify me for claiming “Maybe the current measure we are taking are not ideal based on what we know so far”, please do me the favor of actually reading the whole thing first.

NOR is this an article claiming that our current measures are “killing the economy at the cost of saving lives”… I find that position almost absurd and lacking in understanding about this whole “social contract thing” we have going that means we value life over material goods.

The very uncertain hypothesis I am presenting here is that we are engaging in a “panic response” which might be unjustified given current data and could lead to both a higher number of people dying from coivd-19, higher numbers of people dying overall and worse economic damage than the proper response.

Lastly, and very importantly, I am not an MD nor an epidemiologist and taking a though piece as a guide for deciding to isolate yourself or to break quarantine is pretty stupid. If this encourages any action other than “Hmh, interesting, let me try to find some data and look at it”, then I will claim right now said action is misguided.

Are children less likely to be infected by srars-cov-2 ? (No)

It’s fairly hard to get raw data about covid-19 cases, the mos comprehensive dataset of individual cases I could find is compiled by the medical community at DXY.cn (a Chinese medical discussion board):

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jS24DjSPVWa4iuxuD4OAXrE3QeI8c9BC1hSlqr-NMiU/edit#gid=1187587451

I find it curios that out of 397 cases with a reported age in the US, only 4 were under the age of 15.

I say I find this curios because based on the 2018 census data, 18.71% of the US population is under 15 years of age.

This leads me t...
The Solution is Inaction
by Amritam Gamaya — 2020-03-24T18:01:28.863Z

I'm trying to get my current mental model of the Covid crisis in writing, to see both where it leads and where it is incorrect. This is an economic model. Section 1 is defining the problem and vocabulary, section 2 is a description of my mental model, and section 3 is comparing my model to reality.

A couple assumptions I'm making: I assume that we cannot over-isolate (i.e. we should social distance as much as possible, and not worry about overshooting); I assume that this crisis will last about 2 months in its current form, by which time (as in China right now) the situation will look different enough that there's no way to predict and no use in forecasting now; lastly, despite being generally fairly libertarian, I see a strong centralized government like owning Volcano Insurance in Iowa, it's generally a waste of money but when Yellowstone erupts it's a good time to soak them for every last dollar.

Let's separate the American workforce into three groups. The first group is remote-workers. These people are generally able to maintain their economic output while maintaining heavy social isolation. Not only can they work remotely, their customers can utilize their product remotely. I imagine most in the LW community are in this category. While output may be reduced by having to work from home, work continues to get done, and we can in principle ride this thing out for a few months without too much intervention or life-destroying change. Note that e.g. retirees and the long-term unemployed count as remote-workers, vacuously.

The second group is essential-workers. These people can't stop working. They are farmers, grocery-store cashiers, Amazon deliverymen. I would hate to be one of them right now, because their needs will inevitably be the last consideration.

The last group is non-essential non-remote workers, or Eloi (from H.G. Wells, I know Eloi are supposed to be upper class but the point is they are worthless and vulnerable and remnants of an obsolete economic model). The Eloi will destroy our economy. They are the 30% unemployment rate I've heard predicted. They can't have any economic output for the next two months.

How should we deal with these different workers? The optimal thing is for all the Eloi to go into hibernation for a while, neither working nor buying anything. Everyone sits in t...
Breaking quarantine is negligence. Why are democracies acting like we can only ask nicely?
by syllogism — 2020-03-24T14:58:43.135Z

One of the earliest angles on the coronavirus pandemic was that this was a story of the draconian extremes that an authoritarian government can impose on its people. This angle on the events in Wuhan flourished especially while the media and most governments were not taking the pandemic seriously. So we’ve had a lot of hand-wringing: what can western governments do about this, because obviously we can’t do that?

At the worst extremes we have people throwing up their hands and saying, “well we’re screwed, white people will never do what they’re told, unlike those obedient Asians — and it’s not like we can make them, right?”. That attitude is completely crazy. It’s not true, and it’s part of the general atmosphere of extremely mixed messages that have made the crisis so bad.

For instance, consider the Imperial College report to the British government,
which modelled out the likely effects of different policies. Their model assumes that only 70% of people instructed to self-isolate after a coronavirus diagnosis will comply, for a total reduction in contacts of 75%. For stricter measures that quarantine entire households on one positive diagnosis, they assume a compliance rate of only 50%. We’re shutting down entire economies, and yet we view ourselves as helpless to enforce quarantine on confirmed or presumed positive cases?

People who are tested or presumed positive will obey quarantine if they understand that they might go to prison if they don’t. This is in no way an extreme or authoritarian response. It’s completely consistent with civil liberties. Any individual freedom is always constrained by reasonable expectations of harm. None of us have a general-purpose freedom to act however we want regardless of the risks to other people. The specifics of the coronavirus pandemic are unusual, but the general principle isn’t.

Take the most extreme case: someone has tested positive and been instructed to self-isolate, but the person ignores the instruction and infects someone else, who later dies of the infection. This is an act of extreme and callous negligence. The person who left quarantine was informed of a specific risk, they ignored that information, and they have caused someone else’s death for a frivolous purpose. It is not unrea...
History's Biggest Natural Experiment
by jimrandomh — 2020-03-24T02:56:30.070Z

Faced with the threat of COVID-19, most countries in the world are suddenly, dramatically improving their hygiene and infectious disease control. This won't just slow the spread of COVID-19. As a byproduct, it will also suppress almost every other contagious disease. This creates a natural experiment, which answers the question:

What would happen if we fully suppressed influenza, the common cold, and all the other ignored, minor infectious diseases, all at once?

About

13% of cancers worldwide

are attributable to known infectious causes. Many other health problems are suspected to be related to infectious disease, including

chronic fatigue syndrome

,

type 1 diabetes

,

hypothyroidism

,

obesity

,

Alzheimers disease

,

bipolar disorder

, and

some

mechanisms

of

aging

. (And

obesity again but this time it's a bacterium instead of a virus

.)

In the coming year, we're going to see large reductions in many diseases we never realized were infectious-disease related. As bad as COVID-19 is, this will be a pretty substantial silver lining.

Most of the diseases won't stay gone; social distancing and citywide lockdowns are costly, and most diseases will retain enough reservoirs to bounce back after we return to normal. What we'll get is a period we can study retrospectively, different in different countries, in which almost no disease transmission occurred.

This will be confounded by COVID-19 itself, of course. People who themselves had COVID-19 will have a lot of health problems, which studies will need to account for. The isolation of social distancing, the anxiety of watching the disaster unfold, and the poverty of job-less and economic decline will leave their mark. In countries where COVID-19 took hold, during the height of the pandemic, cancers and autoimmune disorders and other conditions will have been left undiagnosed due to the shortage of hospitals. We won't easily be able to tell which diseases matched with which health conditions. With clever methodology and access to data in countries which had different outcomes, all of these issues will be possible to work around.

The world's attention is now very focused on the short term. Let's give a little thought to what next year will look like.