This sug­gests that a hu­midity be­tween 50-60% is op­ti­mal https://​​www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/​​pmc/​​ar­ti­cles/​​PMC2863430/​​

Thank you for writ­ing such a clear ar­ti­cle on the is­sue. Cleared up my con­fu­sion around EMH, and es­pe­cially how it differs from the ran­dom walk hy­poth­e­sis. I’ll definitely refer­ence this ar­ti­cle when peo­ple bring up EMH.

Maybe peo­ple should, af­ter re­mov­ing a mask, wash their hands, then their faces (with a cloth too per­haps), and then their hands again?

I’d imag­ine in­creased costs first squeeze ‘ex­ist­ing’ prof­its be­fore prices rise so maybe pub­li­cly owned gro­cery com­pa­nies would be a good enough (in­di­rect) proxy.

I think some en­courage­ment is war­ranted, es­pe­cially for peo­ple that know how to do it most effec­tively. I wouldn’t ex­pect any of this to re­place ex­ist­ing food sup­plies, but it might help com­ple­ment them.

I think I get what you’re say­ing. Is it roughly the fol­low­ing?

“If an AI race did oc­cur, maybe similar is­sues to what we saw in MAD might oc­cur; there may well be an anal­ogy there. But there’s a dis­anal­ogy be­tween the nu­clear weapon case and the AI risk case with re­gards to the ini­tial race, such that the ini­tial nu­clear race pro­vides lit­tle/​no ev­i­dence that a similar AI race may oc­cur. And if a similar AI race doesn’t oc­cur, then the con­di­tions un­der which MAD-style strate­gies may arise would not oc­cur. So it might not re­ally mat­ter if there’s an anal­ogy be­tween the AI risk situ­a­tion if a race oc­curred and the MAD situ­a­tion.”

If so, I think that makes sense to me, and it seems an in­ter­est­ing/​im­por­tant ar­gu­ment. Though it seems to sug­gest some­thing more like “We may be more ok than peo­ple might think, as long as we avoid an AI race, and we’ll prob­a­bly avoid an AI race”, rather than sim­ply “We may be more ok than peo­ple might think”. And that dis­tinc­tion might e.g. sug­gest ad­di­tional value to strat­egy/​policy/​gov­er­nance work to avoid race dy­nam­ics, or to in­ves­ti­gate how likely they are. (I don’t think this is dis­agree­ing with you, just high­light­ing a par­tic­u­lar thing a bit more.)

In­ter­est­ing (again!).

So you’ve up­dated your un­con­di­tional es­ti­mate from ~5% (1 in 20) to ~9%? If so, peo­ple may have to stop cit­ing you as an “op­ti­mist”… (which was already per­haps a tad mis­lead­ing, given what the 1 in 20 was about)

(I mean, I know we’re all sort-of just play­ing with in­cred­ibly un­cer­tain num­bers about fuzzy sce­nar­ios any­way, but still.)

In the broader ra­tio­nal­ity/​EA com­mu­nity there was also a Siderea post on Jan 30 and an 80K pod­cast on Feb 3 (along with a fol­lowup pod­cast on Feb 14).

Th­ese two, plus Matthew Bar­nett’s late Jan EA Fo­rum post (which you linked), are the three ex­am­ples I re­call which look most like early visi­ble pub­lic alarms from the ra­tio­nal­ity/​EA com­mu­nity.

Other writ­ing was less visi­ble (e.g., on Twit­ter, Face­book, or Me­tac­u­lus), less alarm-like (dis­cus­sions of some as­pect of what was hap­pen­ing rather than a call to at­ten­tion), or later (like the putanu­monit See­ing the Smoke post on Feb 27).

1. This is not par­tic­u­larly cred­ible.

2. It’s also not par­tic­u­larly im­por­tant.

3. Even if it were 100 per­cent true, it would be what I be­lieve Less Wrong likes to call an “in­fo­haz­ard”. Un­less you want to liter­ally get peo­ple kil­led, you don’t want to spread this stuff.

Note: I’m one of those peo­ple who has taken up gar­den­ing for lack of other ac­tivi­ties, and we’ve prob­a­bly spent $200 so far, and that’s WITH me get­ting a lot of free stuff from e.g. Nextdoor (which is a big time sink, be­cause it dis­ap­pears pretty fast)

Well that’s re­as­sur­ing.

Do you know of any videos on this? Ideally while the per­son is nar­rat­ing their thoughts out loud.

What is the plan go­ing for­ward for in­ter­views? Are you plan­ning to in­ter­view peo­ple who are more pes­simistic?

Sadly Google Docs re­ally doesn’t like be­ing hosted on ex­ter­nal web­sites, so I would try to up­load them some­where else (imgur works well for me).

I’m cur­rently ex­plor­ing a pos­si­ble fea­ture wherein ques­tion-au­thors, and mod­er­a­tors, can flag an­swers as “Top An­swers”, which trig­ger the ques­tion mov­ing to the top of the home page, and adding the most re­cent “top an­swer” au­thor as a co-au­thor of the post.

Not 100% sure on the im­ple­men­ta­tion de­tails. Does that sound like that would help with this prob­lem?

Thank you for the offer, I am how­ever cur­rently re­luc­tant to in­ter­act with peo­ple I met on the in­ter­net in this way. But know that your open­ness and forth­com­ing­ness is greatly ap­pre­ci­ated :)

See this for some com­men­tary on that study (and oth­ers)

Yeah the only way I can see that prices now would rise in an­ti­ci­pa­tion of months-away short­ages would be some­one buy­ing loads of non­per­ish­able food and putting it into a ware­house for stor­age. No one would do that at scale; they would ex­pect to be vil­ified and their prop­erty con­fis­cated.

Maybe we could look at the price of some fi­nan­cial in­stru­ment to learn the mar­ket’s be­lief about fu­ture food prices, but I wouldn’t know the de­tails.

Bill Gates is on it.

In par­tic­u­lar, the com­bi­na­tion of the gly­cans right next to the poly­ba­sic cleav­age site sug­gests that the se­lec­tion for the cleav­age site prob­a­bly oc­curred in the pres­ence of an im­mune sys­tem rather than in cul­ture.