Glad to hear it’s working well.

I like your chart of today’s work & breaks on your site.

Note the name change: https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​RWu8eZqbwgB9zaerh/​​?commentId=eFAiK5kAG3nrvjFjr

A negative rapid test should be necessary before ending isolation. The CDC’s new guidelines don’t say this but this seems overdetermined and obvious to me. If you care about not being infectious, you should check on that before exposing others.

How common are false positives after infection?

Eg the CDC says that:

Recovered patients: Patients who have recovered from COVID-19 can continue to have detectable SARS-CoV-2 RNA in upper respiratory specimens for up to 3 months after illness onset. However, replication-competent virus has not been reliably recovered from such patients, and they are not likely infectious.

Which suggests they might be not that uncommon.

UTSouthwesterner Medical Center says that (the CDC says something similar):

How can a patient have a positive PCR test but not be infectious?

Reverse transcriptase-quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) is the primary method used to diagnose SARS-CoV-2 infection and many other viruses. The test works by creating copies of viral genetic material in respiratory samples over many cycles. A single copy of viral RNA can be amplified to more than 2 trillion copies during a typical 40-cycle testing protocol. Amplification of genomic sequence is measured in cycle thresholds (Ct) and the Ct values correlate with whether a sample contains infectious virus particles. If the viral RNA is detected after just a few amplification cycles (i.e. at a low Ct value), that means high RNA levels are present and thus more viable virus; however, because this test is designed to be a sensitive diagnostic tool (not for monitoring disease progression), a very high Ct value (low RNA level) is set as a positive range cutoff. This means that very low levels of the RNA or viral genomic fragments can test “positive” for months after the acute infection but are not associated with live virus. This detection issue is common for other RNA viruses.

Which suggests to me that PCR testing might be prone to false positive after an infection, but does not clarify to me if Rapid Antigen Tests are also prone to false positives.

My guess is that false positives in the Rapid Antigen Test are uncommon, since the proposed causal mechanism for why PCRs give false positives is because of the viral load amplification, which does not happen with Rapid Antigen Tests.

The key question: should I end isolation after 10 days regardless of rapid antigen test result?

Fantastic to see this wonderful game be passed onto a new generation!

I also tried asking GPT-3 with a small change to the question and got some good answers.

Question: What food would you use to prop a book open and why would that work?

Answer: A hardcover book can be propped open by using a can of food. The weight of the can will keep the pages of the book open

And

Question: What fruit would you use to prop a book open and why would that work?

Answer: A banana would work to prop a book open because the curved shape of the fruit would hold the pages of the book open.

Wow:

https://​​ysph.yale.edu/​​news-article/​​wearable-air-sampler-detects-personal-exposure-to-sars-cov-2/​​

Wearable Covid detectors!

One could frame this as a need for more media that is both yummy and true/​useful. Since there is statistically so much yummy media that isn’t true/​useful we might gain the (somewhat false) intuition that yummy is a good signal for not true/​useful. But that’s how the world is now, not necessarily how it should be. Sam Rosen had a similar argument on the Clearer Thinking podcast (timestamp in the link): https://​​overcast.fm/​​+kgCChiF9A/​​1:29:39

Products and content can be designed without the effect of addicting you, without making you a lotus eater (https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​KwdcMts8P8hacqwrX/​​noticing-the-taste-of-lotus).

That was my intuition as well. A and C are just not entangled with the physical world at all. B is a maybe; it’s a big leap from poetry to taking over the world, but humans are something that has to be modelled and that’s where trouble starts.

I came across the slime mould article some time ago via the Marginal Revolution blog. I do not find it in the least convincing. It seems to me they have their theory, then cherry pick and misinterpret all evidence to fit.

In short, totally agree with what you’re saying here.

My personal thoughts on the many errors in the SMTM theory here should you be interested: https://​​www.livenowthrivelater.co.uk/​​2021/​​09/​​is-the-obesity-epidemic-a-mystery-part-1/​​

https://​​www.livenowthrivelater.co.uk/​​2021/​​09/​​is-the-obesity-epidemic-a-mystery-part-2/​​

I came across the slime mould article some time ago via the Marginal Revolution blog. I do not find it in the least convincing. It seems to me they have their theory, then cherry pick and misinterpret all evidence to fit.

My personal thoughts on their theory here: https://​​www.livenowthrivelater.co.uk/​​2021/​​09/​​is-the-obesity-epidemic-a-mystery-part-1/​​

https://​​www.livenowthrivelater.co.uk/​​2021/​​09/​​is-the-obesity-epidemic-a-mystery-part-2/​​

Stöcker is the founder of Euroimmun, a company that makes lab chemicals and also happens to make Covid antibody tests. Through his contacts, he managed to get his hands on the spike protein DNA early and made his own recombinant vaccine candidate.

To be exact, part of creating the Covid antibody tests was creating the spike protein domains so his company was already creating those for reasons unrelated to making the vaccine.

If you want to synthesize a new pandemic you would need to know what proteins to add. That’s very hard. It’s much easier to

It seems the South African’s for example put older variants together in the lab with antibodies against the spike protein to test how soon it evolves to get immune evasion. That’s the kind of research with the potential to produce new pandemics waves like Omicron.

I think it’s quite problematic to see responsibility not about upholding promises that one makes and responsibility being about social roles one has.

If I throw a party, then I have a special responsibility that the room is warm enough as the host that my guests don’t have even when everyone can turn the thermostat.

Soryu is actually talking about responsibility in the video. He claims that a guru-lead organization is ethically superior to a joint-stock corporation because that while in a joint-stock corporation nobody is really responsible for what the organization does in a guru-lead organization responsibility is clear.

By his own standards, he’s more responsible for what happens here than the CEO of a major corporation is when something problematic happens in that organization.

I think the failure case identified in this post is plausible (and likely) and is very clearly explained so props for that!

However, I agree with Jacob’s criticism here. Any AGI success story basically has to have “the safest model” also be “the most powerful” model, because of incentives and coordination problems.

Models that are themselves optimizers are going to be significantly more powerful and useful than “optimizer free” models. So the suggestion of trying to avoiding mesa-optimization altogether is a bit of a fabricated option. There is an interesting parallel here with the suggestion of just “not building agents” (https://​​www.gwern.net/​​Tool-AI).

So from where I am sitting, we have no option but to tackle aligning the mesa-optimizer cascade head-on.

Well the point isn’t meant to be that the food is inherently unsatisfying. The point is meant to be that the food is stuff that is within the normal range of palatability we are adapted for.

There’s reasonable justification for adding rice and traditional bread too given their long history of consumption before obesity was common.

If you can make nice tasting food from that, that’s a good thing. If you can achieve genuine ‘cafeteria food’ hyperpalatability I’ll be seriously impressed. It seems like it would be very hard to do without a fat like butter/​oil or a sweetener like table sugar/​honey.

I feel like I could make some highly palatable food under these restrictions. Mashed potatoes with something akin to beef stroganoff?

I’m not sure why you pick “meat, fruit, vegetables and spices” as the rule. I’d pick something like “only eat unsatisfying food” as the rule.

And to add to my last comment, just to explain why I wrote things the way I did, I think the more important thing in terms of recommendations to a general audience is that in my personal experience, most people I’ve talked to have indeed upgraded to an N95, but extremely few people I’ve talked to have actually ended up wearing a P100 elastomeric. They have a ton of advantages, but most people simply don’t want to use them. So in my mask article I explain the advantages, but in my general advice article I feel like it’s more useful to simply say upgrade to a N95 or P100.

Thank you for the link! Somehow I missed the Eliezer’s post during my research. I’ll add it to my post.

My reading the linked argument back in 2007 made me install a habit of always immediately evaluating the truth value of basically everything everyone tells me

I think it’s an excellent habit. Will try it too.

I agree with most of your points, especially about poor seal for typical N95s, but in my personal experience, I am often wearing a mask intermittently, not wearing it for the whole day, and in that context I typically prefer to use a N95 which I can fold and put in my pocket—that convenience is very important for me. I definitely do recommend an elastomeric P100 for long-duration wear where the convenience factor is not an issue. And I found it basically impossible to make myself audible in a loud crowded environment, although it’s fine in quieter environments.

I have not done a lot of detailed research into different P100 filters, my cursory reading suggested that they were generally “good enough” for my purposes (N95->P100 being a large difference, while different P100 filters having only a relatively small difference, as far as I know), but I appreciate your info and suggestions.

The counterfeiting issues I’ve heard of mostly apply to N95s/​KN95s/​etc. I had not previously heard of it in the context of elastomeric respirators and their filters, although it wouldn’t surprise me. My experience with a couple other vendors I tried has been unpleasant (issues with long delays and no stock etc), so I ended up just going with Amazon. Do you have recommended vendors?

Judging by the tropes, it indeed could be one of the more rational ones. Will try it, thank you!