Two things to keep in mind here though.

First, it is not clear that the cur­rent test­ing is even catch­ing all the cases. I think one of the Chi­nese CDC equiv­a­lent re­searchers has said the test they have available is only iden­ti­fy­ing 30 to 50 per­cent of the cases but is es­sen­tially 100% ac­cu­rate when iden­ti­fy­ing an in­fec­tion. So I’m not sure we get too much by just test­ing ev­ery­one with po­ten­tial symp­toms (com­mu­nity ac­quired). I sus­pect that de­pends on how plen­tiful the sup­ply of test kits might be.

The other thing, it sounds like this might be a virus that vac­cine will ever be available for. There is not one for SARS nor for HIV and COVID-19 seems to be similar to both (clearly same fam­ily as SARS).

I won­der if en­sur­ing one has an ex­er­cise plan (or per­haps some equip­ment—could be DIY type equip­ment) should not also be on the list of items to “stock­pile” if one is self-iso­lat­ing or even un­der quaran­tine.

I never re­ally thought about that be­fore you men­tioned it, but I have an or­bital ma­chine in my work­shop/​garage so take that from granted.

It’s not a big amount. (For, e.g., a typ­i­cal mains ca­ble.) And ca­bling, es­pe­cially if the cur­rents flow­ing in it are at high fre­quen­cies (which means more ra­di­a­tion), is of­ten de­signed to re­duce that ra­di­a­tion. That’s one rea­son why we have coax­ial ca­bles and twisted pairs. For a 50Hz or 60Hz power ca­ble, though, the ra­di­a­tive losses are tiny.

You can power de­vices wire­lessly—us­ing “those cord­less charg­ers”. They are de­signed to max­i­mize the ex­tent to which these effects hap­pen, and of course the de­vices need to be de­signed to work that way. Or­di­nary mains ca­bles don’t ra­di­ate a lot and it isn’t prac­ti­cal to power any­thing non­triv­ial by putting it near a mains ca­ble.

But the most effec­tive way of get­ting en­ergy from the field around a pair of wires is … to con­nect the wires into an elec­tric cir­cuit. In­deed, it’s only when they’re con­nected in such a cir­cuit that the cur­rent will flow through the wires and the en­ergy will flow around them.

Anna from Face­book notes: “I like this, but ba­si­cally never meet this stan­dard for my­self. I feel like I’d never be able to do any­thing mean­ingful if I stuck to this.”

This is an im­por­tant enough point that it kinda makes me want to rewrite the fi­nal sec­tion of the es­say dra­mat­i­cally to ac­count for it bet­ter.

[FB didn’t let me copy paste ex­act word­ing. Grrr FB! Copy­ing this over by hand to make it eas­ier for me to get around to this later]

In The Fun The­ory Se­quence Eliezer writes about the real life ap­pli­ca­tions of this, eg.

Fun The­ory is the field of knowl­edge that deals in ques­tions such as “How much fun is there in the uni­verse?”, “Will we ever run out of fun?”, “Are we hav­ing fun yet?” and “Could we be hav­ing more fun?”

and

If no one can imag­ine a Fu­ture where any­one would want to live, that may drain off mo­ti­va­tion to work on the pro­ject. The prospect of end­less bore­dom is rou­tinely fielded by con­ser­va­tives as a knock­down ar­gu­ment against re­search on lifes­pan ex­ten­sion, against cry­on­ics, against all tran­shu­man­ism, and oc­ca­sion­ally against the en­tire En­light­en­ment ideal of a bet­ter fu­ture.

So I don’t think the ar­ti­cle was in­tended only as a guide to au­thors.

Great table to offer. Might be good to also up­date on some re­lated state. Males seem twice as likely as fe­males to con­tract the in­fec­tion (not pos­i­tive here if that also scales with age or not)

Also, those with pre­ex­ist­ing con­di­tion (heart, lung, other im­mune sys­tem tax­ing states) are also more likely to suffer more, and be among those dy­ing than those who are gen­er­ally healthy.

I think there was also a sus­pected link be­tween smok­ing and higher risk if ex­posed to COVID-19. That is prob­a­bly too cor­re­lated with the other pre­ex­ist­ing health con­di­tions that might be too difficult to say much.

Walk­ing into a new coun­try where peo­ple speak very lit­tle English re­minds me of the dan­gers of over com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

Go­ing into a restau­rant and say­ing: “Could I get the turk­ish coffee and an omelette with a.… crois­sant, oh, and a glass of wa­ter, no ice and, I know this is a bit weird, but I like cin­na­mon in my turk­ish coffee, could you add a bit of cin­na­mon to it ? Oh, ac­tu­ally, could you scratch the omelette and do poached eggs in­stead”

Is a recipe for failure, at best the waiter looks at you con­fused and you can be ashamed of your poor com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills and start over.

At worst you’re get­ting an omelette, with a cin­na­mon bun in­stead of a crois­sant, two cups of turk­ish coffee, with some ad­di­tional poached eggs and a room-tem­per­a­ture bot­tle of wa­ter.

Maybe a far fetched ex­am­ple, but the point is: The more in­struc­tions you give, the flour­ishes you put into your re­quest, the higher the like­li­hood that the core of the re­quests gets lost.

If you can point at the items on the menu and hold a num­ber of fingers in the air to in­di­cate the quan­tity, that’s an ideal way to or­der.

But it’s cu­rios that this sort of over com­mu­ni­ca­tion never hap­pens in, say, Ja­pan. In places where peo­ple know very lit­tle to no English and where they don’t mind tel­ling you that what you just said made no sense (or at least they get very visi­bly em­bar­rassed, more so than their stan­dard over-the-top anx­iety, and the fact that it made no sense is in­stantly ob­vi­ous to any­one).

It hap­pens in the coun­tries where peo­ple kinda-know English and where they con­sider it rude to ad­mit to not un­der­stand­ing you.

Ja­panese and Taiwanese clerks, ran­dom pedes­tri­ans I ask for di­rec­tions and servers, know about as much English as I know Ja­panese or Chi­nese. But we can com­mu­ni­cate just fine via grunts, smiles, point­ing, shak­ing of heads and tak­ing out a phone to google trans­late if the in­ter­ac­tions is bar­ing close to the 30s mark with no re­s­olu­tion in sight.

The same archtypes in In­dia and Le­banon speak close to cur­sive English though, give them 6-12 months in the UK or US plus a panache for learn­ing and they’d be a na­tive speaker (I guess it could be ar­gued that many peo­ple in In­dia speak 100% perfect English, but their own di­alect, but for the in­tents and pur­poses of this post I’m refer­ring to English as UK/​US city English).

Yet it’s always in the sec­ond kind of coun­try where I find my over com­mu­nica­tive style fails me. Par­tially be­cause I’m more in­clined to use it, par­tially be­cause peo­ple are less in­clined to ad­mit I’m not mak­ing any sense.

I’m pretty sure it’s this phe­nomenon is a very good metaphor or in­stan­ti­a­tion of a prin­ci­ple that ap­plies in many other situ­a­tions, es­pe­cially in ex­pert com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Or rather, in how ex­pert-lay­man vs ex­pert-ex­pert vs ex­pert-{al­most ex­pert} com­mu­ni­ca­tion works.

Coron­aviruses may sur­vive a lot longer, de­pend­ing on speci­fics.

https://​​www.google.com/​​amp/​​s/​​www.med­i­calnew­sto­day.com/​​amp/​​ar­ti­cles/​​coro­n­aviruses-how-long-can-they-sur­vive-on-surfaces

This just boils down to “show­ing off” though. But this makes lit­tle sense con­sid­er­ing:

a) both gen­ders en­gage in bad prac­tices. As in, I’d ex­pect to see a lot of men do­ing cross fit, but it doesn’t make sense when you con­sider there’s a pretty even gen­der split. “Show­ing off health” in a way that’s harm­ful to health is not evolu­tion­ary adap­tive for women (where it ar­guably pays off to live for a long time, evolu­tion­ar­ily speak­ing). This is backed up by other high-risk be­hav­iors be­ing mainly a men’s thing

b) sports are a very bad way to show off, es­pe­cially the sports that come with high risk of in­jury and per­ma­nent degra­da­tion when prac­ticed in their cur­rent ex­treme (e.g. weight lift­ing, climb­ing, gym­nas­tics, rugby, hokey). The high­est pay-off sports I can think of (in terms of so­cial sig­nal­ing) are foot­ball, amer­i­can foot­ball, bas­ket­ball and base­ball… since they are pop­u­lar and thus the com­pe­ti­tion is both in­tense and achiev­ing high rank is re­ward­ing. Other than amer­i­can foot­ball they are all pretty phys­i­cally safe as far as sports go… when there are risks, they come from other play­ers (e.g. get­ting a ball to the head) not from over-train­ing or over-perform­ing.

So ba­si­cally, if it’s ge­netic miss-firing then I’d ex­pect to see it mis­fire al­most only in men, and this is un­true.

If it’s “ra­tio­nal” be­hav­ior (as in, ra­tio­nal from the per­spec­tive of our pri­mate an­ces­tor) then I’d ex­pect to see the more dan­ger­ous forms of show­ing off bring the most so­cial gains rather than vice-versa.

Granted, I do think hand­i­cap prin­ci­ple can be par­tially to blame for “start­ing” the thing, but I think it con­tinues be­cause of higher level memes that have lit­tle to do with so­cial sig­nal­ing or ge­net­ics.

Hi! I’m from China-yes, ex­actly the place where COVID-19 was born and ru­ined our Spring Fes­ti­val com­pletely. After months-long bat­tle with the virus, now the con­firmed case of COVID-19 has down to an al­l­time low. But it sad­dens me to see that this virus seem to spread across other coun­tries,South Korea,Ja­pan,Iran,Italy etc. Here I’d like to share with you some ad­vice that Chi­nese gov­er­ment used to pre­vent the virus from in­fect­ing more peo­ple.

1.In­tially, the gov­ern­ment ad­vised peo­ple to stay at home. But soon,the ad­vice es­ca­lated to nearly an or­der. Sounds ex­ag­ger­at­ing? Not at all! , I’m from coun­tryside where rules and reg­u­la­tions sup­posed to be the loos­est. But upon re­ceiv­ing the or­der from cen­tral gov­ernemnt, all villages im­ple­mented strict con­trol over in­dii­d­ual mo­bil­ity. Sim­ply put, all villages, coun­ties, towns and cities were do­ing their best to iso­late them­selves from oth­ers. You prob­a­bly heard that the Wuhan city was locked down. Well, that is true and my heart goes to all the coun­try­man stuck there. Many peo­ple con­demned Chi­nese gov­ern­ment as in­huamne and stupid. Yet given so lit­tle time , the method is by far the most effi­cient one! Rea­sons be­hind it is sim­ple: STOP PHYSICAL CONTACT EQUALS STOP THE VIRUS FROM SPREADING.

2.Well, the first one is not per­sonal sug­ges­tion. Here it is.

Why we self quaran­tine?

① For peo­ple who are wor­ried that they may get in­fected. Self quaran­tine for 14 days is ad­vised by lead­ing doc­tors in China. You know, just to see if you have any sym­ph­tons:burn­ing up, sore throat, fever etc.If you do have above sym­ph­tons, rush to hos­pi­tals at no time. Doc­tors and nursed are always there ²⁴⁄₇ fight­ing to save peo­ple. RESPECT to them.

②For healthy peo­ple: It’s just the eas­iest way to make sure you are safe and sound :) (Pro­vided that your fam­ily mem­bers are healthy as well!)

Does self quaran­tine means com­plete iso­la­tion from the out­side world?

That is not the case here. I mean com­plete iso­la­tion is im­pos­si­ble in big cities. You have to stock food once in a while. So Chi­nese peo­ple are ad­vised to stay at home un­less it’s re­ally im­por­tant things like run­ning­gnni’nnur er­rands, see­ing a doc­tor etc. And while you are out, always wear a mask.

3. MASK. MASK. MASK.

I don’t know why but many west­erns seemed against this. I talked to my English Coach about it and he sim­ply said he didn’t be­lieve it would work and it looks dumb. Still, wear­ing a mask when you out in pub­lic can dras­ti­cally re­duce your chances to get in­fected(Plz check some videos on­line to learn how to wear them prop­erly . Other­wise it’s just use­less) . I’m not mak­ing it up here.Its sim­ply what I picked up from the manda­tory on­line les­sons about COVID-19. YES, it’s manda­tory to all stu­dents here(That’s what i’ve heard so far). And those les­sons are made by pres­ti­gious doc­tors and med­i­cal staff, so I be­live those ad­vice are pretty solid.

That’s all. Hope they are use­ful and match the crite­ria in the ar­ti­cle. If not, please leave me some mes­sages and feel free to edit this text. :)

I’m miss­ing Allen Carr’s book (https://​​www.ama­zon.com/​​Allen-Carrs-Easy-Con­trol-Al­co­hol-ebook/​​dp/​​B07B7QRWTH ) in the list of books. I quit drink­ing af­ter read­ing that book over 3 years ago, and it was al­most like flip­ping a switch, so fast did it turn off my de­sire to drink.

Seems like the an­swer is no, judg­ing by this email from a “Soviet-born scholar who teaches in an Amer­i­can pub­lic uni­ver­sity”, as quoted in Rod Dre­her’s Post­card From Pre-To­tal­i­tar­ian Amer­ica:

I know from your blog that the work on your new book is go­ing well and I’m glad be­cause, boy, it’s so needed. I’m ob­serv­ing some dis­turb­ing de­vel­op­ments on my cam­pus, and we are re­ally not one of those wokester schools for spoiled brats one nor­mally as­so­ci­ates with this kind of thing.
This aca­demic year I’ve had an op­por­tu­nity to work with some early-ca­reer aca­demics. Th­ese are newly-minted PhDs that are in their first year on the tenure-track. What’s re­ally scary is that they sincerely be­lieve all the woke dogma. Older peo­ple – those in their for­ties, fifties or six­ties – might par­rot the woke mantras be­cause it’s what ev­ery­body in academia does and you have to sur­vive. But the younger gen­er­a­tion ac­tu­ally be­lieves it all. Transwomen are women, black stu­dents fail calcu­lus be­cause there are no calc profs who “look like them,” ‘white­ness’ is the most op­pres­sive thing in the world, the US is the most evil coun­try in his­tory, any­body who votes Repub­li­can is a racist, ev­ery­body who goes to church is a bi­got but the hi­jab is deeply liber­at­ing. I gen­tly mocked some of this stuff (like we nor­mally do among older aca­demics), and two of the younger aca­demics in the group I su­per­vise ac­tu­ally cried. Be­cause they be­lieve all this so deeply, and I’d even say fa­nat­i­cally, that they couldn’t com­pre­hend why I wasn’t tak­ing it se­ri­ously.
The fa­nat­i­cal glim­mer in their eyes re­ally scared me.
Back in the USSR in the 1970s and the 1980s no­body be­lieved the dogma. Peo­ple re­peated the ide­olog­i­cal mantras for cyn­i­cal rea­sons, to get ad­vanced in their ca­reers or get food pack­ages. Many did it to pro­tect their kids. But no­body sincerely be­lieved. That is what ul­ti­mately saved us. As soon as the regime weak­ened a bit, it was doomed be­cause there were no sincere be­liev­ers any more. Every­body who did take the dogma se­ri­ously be­longed to the gen­er­a­tion of my great-grand­par­ents.
In the US, though, the gen­er­a­tion of the fa­nat­i­cal be­liev­ers is only now grow­ing up and com­ing into its prime. We’ll have to wait un­til their grand­kids grow up to see a gen­er­a­tion that will be so fed up with the dogma that it will em­brace free­dom of thought and ex­pres­sion. But that’s a long way away in the fu­ture.
I’m men­tor­ing a group of young schol­ars in the Hu­man­i­ties to help them do re­search, and I’m start­ing to hate this task. Young schol­ars al­most with­out ex­cep­tion think that schol­ar­ship is en­tirely about re­peat­ing woke slo­gans com­pletely un­crit­i­cally. Again, this is differ­ent from the USSR where schol­ars pep­pered their writ­ing with the slo­gans but always took great pride in try­ing to sneak in some real think­ing and real anal­y­sis be­hind the re­quired ide­olog­i­cal drivel. Every Soviet scholar start­ing from the 1970s was a dis­si­dent at heart be­cause ev­ery­body knew that the ide­ol­ogy was rot­ten.
All of this is sad and very scary. I never thought I’d ex­pe­rience any­thing worse, any­thing more in­tel­lec­tu­ally stifling than the USSR of its last two decades of ex­is­tence. But now I do see some­thing worse.

It seems like while we were busy try­ing to “raise the san­ity wa­ter­line” (which BTW kept talk­ing about re­li­gion, in ret­ro­spect is a com­pletely wrong tar­get), oth­ers have man­aged to un­plug the drain hole.

The AUP is sup­posed to pre­vent the agent ac­cu­mu­lat­ing power. The AI ini­tially has huge po­ten­tial power (be­cause its po­ten­tial power is all the power it could ever ac­cu­mu­late, given its best strat­egy to ac­cu­mu­late power) and the penalty is sup­posed to pre­vent it turn­ing that po­ten­tial into ac­tual power—as mea­sured by AUP.

So the AI always has the power to build a sub­agent; that post just shows that it can do this with­out trig­ger­ing the AUP-power penalty.

From The Poli­tics Of Plague, which I came across just af­ter writ­ing the above:

There was a ter­rible famine in Rus­sia, in 1891-92. The tsarist gov­ern­ment botched the han­dling of the catas­tro­phe. This deeply un­der­mined pub­lic con­fi­dence in the poli­ti­cal or­der, and threw fuel on the smol­der­ing rev­olu­tion­ary fire. Do not doubt for a mo­ment how the state’s in­abil­ity to han­dle a ma­jor pub­lic health crisis can shake the poli­ti­cal or­der to its foun­da­tions. The Amer­i­can peo­ple already have very low con­fi­dence in our pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions. We could be headed into un­charted wa­ters, and in­deed, may already be in them, but we just don’t re­al­ize it yet.

I mainly men­tioned child-rulers be­cause Robin was us­ing that ex­am­ple; and I used “get­ting de­posed” as an ex­am­ple of agency prob­lems that weren’t of­ten (ever?) listed in the eco­nomics liter­a­ture.

Have a GAN net­work write ar­ti­cles on the dan­geros of AGI, once it starts to con­vince peo­ple we have a prob­lem we do have a prob­lem and it wil be adressed ;)

• Trump will be blamed (fairly or un­fairly, prob­a­bly fairly judg­ing from his perfor­mance so far) for mishan­dling the US re­sponse, and it seems like there’s a good chance that he’ll lose the elec­tion over this.

• The cur­rent health care sys­tem will be blamed (fairly or un­fairly) mak­ing big re­forms more likely.

• The Right as a whole (es­pe­cially Trump sup­port­ers) will be blamed and they’ll lose more ground in our epistemic in­sti­tu­tions (jour­nal­ism, academia, K-12 ed­u­ca­tion). With even fewer checks on the Left’s power within those in­sti­tu­tions, they’ll be­come purer forms of pro­pa­ganda/​in­doc­tri­na­tion ma­chines for the Left.

• It will be eas­ier to con­vince peo­ple that hu­man­ity won’t pre­pare for or han­dle x-risks cor­rectly by de­fault, even with plenty of “warn­ing shots”.

Nice! There are a lot of cases be­ing con­sid­ered here, but my main take­away is that these im­pact mea­sures have sur­pris­ing loop­holes, once the agent be­comes pow­er­ful enough to con­struct sub-agents.

Math­e­mat­i­cally, my main take­away is that, for the im­pact mea­sure PENALTY(s,a)=${\sum }_i|Q_{R_i}(s,a)-Q_{R_i}(s,\varnothing )|$ from Con­ser­va­tive Agency, if the agent wants to achieve the sub-goal $R_i$ while avoid­ing the penalty trig­gered by the $R_i$ term, it can build a sub-agent that is slightly worse at achiev­ing $R_i$ than it it would be it­self, and set it loose.

Now for some more spec­u­la­tive thoughts. I think the main source of the loop­hole above is the part $Q_{R_i}(s,\varnothing )$, so what hap­pens if we just delete that part? Then we get an agent with an in­cen­tive to stop any hu­man pre­sent in the en­vi­ron­ment from be­com­ing too good at achiev­ing the goal $R_i$, which would be bad. More in­for­mally, it looks like the penalty term has a loop­hole be­cause it does not dis­t­in­guish be­tween hu­mans and sub-agents.

Alice and Bob have a son Carl. Carl walks around and breaks a vase. Who is re­spon­si­ble?

Ob­vi­ously, this de­pends on many fac­tors, in­clud­ing Carl’s age. To man­age the real world, we weave a quite com­plex web to de­ter­mine ac­countabil­ity.

In one way, it is en­courag­ing that very sim­ple and com­pact im­pact mea­sures, which do not en­code any par­tic­u­lars of the agent en­vi­ron­ment, can be sur­pris­ingly effec­tive in sim­ple en­vi­ron­ments. But my in­tu­ition is that when we scale up to more com­plex en­vi­ron­ments, the only way to cre­ate a good level of ro­bust­ness is to build more com­plex mea­sures that rely in part on en­cod­ing and lev­er­ag­ing spe­cific prop­er­ties of the en­vi­ron­ment.

I started to self-quaran­tine from 25 Jan­uary, rea­sons: un­cer­tainty in mor­tal­ity and the need of a test run. At that mo­ment the situ­a­tion with mor­tal­ity was not as clear as it is now. I still don’t ex­clude higher mor­tal­ity level (than in the table) as for many pa­tients the dis­ease is around one month long and this data is not ac­cu­mu­lated yet. I also more than 40 years old and have hy­per­ten­sion which is a risk fac­tor.

My ob­ser­va­tions about self-iso­la­tion: I eat more, and as a re­sult my stock­pile is go­ing quicker than I ex­pected. And also I gained weight. Also, some­times I feel my self like in a prison and want to go out de­spite any risks. After I go out even­tu­ally, I felt more tired as pos­si­bly first sign of at­ro­phy of mus­cles. All this means that long term self-iso­la­tion has its own risks, mostly car­dio-vas­cu­lar and men­tal state.

This test-run of self-quaran­tine helped me to perfect pro­to­cols of clean­ing things af­ter I went out and of proper wear­ing masks. Not all masks fit equally well, and it de­pends on the shape of the face.

This was meant as a joke. Sorry if the in­tent is not ob­vi­ous.