Hey there~ I’m Austin, currently building https://manifold.markets. Always happy to meet LessWrong people; reach out at akrolsmir@gmail.com, or find a time on https://calendly.com/austinchen/manifold !
Austin Chen
A microCOVID (μCoV) is a 1⁄1,000,000 chance of catching COVID, not of *dying from* COVID. Off the top of my head, COVID has between a 1% and a 0.1% case fatality rate, so the cost of hangout death is something like $1 to $0.10. (Equivalently, a μCoV costs between 1 and 10 cents.) That hangout seems pretty cheap now!
You might separately check cost of going through COVID, which ranges from “no symptoms” to “pretty sick for a week to a month”. Being an affluent, reasonably healthy young person, I’d pay $1k to avoid the COVID experience but not $10k—so this additional cost is between $0.01 and $0.001 per μCoV. For simplicity’s sake, I’m combining both these figures into an overall 1 cent per microCOVID.
I definitely agree that a dollar framing helps make things actionable. Eating inside (5000μCoV = $50) is ridiculously expensive compared to outside (300μCoV = $3), and hitting up a bar, at 40k μCoV, has an astronomical cost of $400!
I hear this objection a lot but don’t have a sense of how likely/how bad “permanent lung/brain damage” is—do you happen to have any sources? I think this scenario is in the public conciousness because it’s scary and newsworthy, not because it’s common. Randomly guessing I’d say that permanent damage is meaningful in ~1% of all cases?
I tried to factor this already into my $1k - $10k COVID avoidance price, but I’d be happy to update on new data, and of course you might have different subjective valuations.
Good point, thanks.
Running the “microCOVID to $” conversion from the other end of the spectrum, the recommendation of 1% COVID risk = 10k μCoV to spend/year would suggest a conversion rate of $1 per μCoV (if your yearly discretionary budget is on the order of $10k/year).
I keep coming back to the “dollars conversion” because there’s a very real sense in which we’re trained our entire lives to evaluate how to price things in dollars; if I tell you a meal costs $25 you have an instant sense of whether that’s cheap or outrageous. Since we don’t have a similar fine-tuned model for risk, piggybacking one on the other could be a good way to build intuition faster.
I accept that my 10k figure is lower than typical; again, I’m relatively young (25) and risk tolerant. I’m curious where you’d bound your “cost of avoiding covid” at - $100k? $1M?
I did not model impact on others, and agree that this is a major oversight—as OP stated, there aren’t great models of this yet and we should try to do better.
But crucially, I don’t think “my current parameters leads to a massive underestimate” logically equates to “dollars are a bad framing device for understanding risk”. I almost feel like the fact that you can have such strong immediate opinions on seeing these dollar figures, means that converting to dollars provided a lot of clarity around our respective thought processes.
Of course it’s a simplification; it paints over, for example, the fact that two people with different incomes but the same risk tolerance would assign different dollar values. But on the flip side, literally every member of our society has grown up assessing the prices of things in dollars. QALY, micromorts, now microcovids, etc are incredibly esoteric by comparison.
Just found the New Orleans study: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.24.20075838v1 , I believe. This was posted early on (April 28th) with a very small sample size (n=20), so I’m discounting this rather heavily now.
I was doing some further research, though, and it seems that the specific correlational studies called out (the LessWrong quoted ones) may actually be fraudulent:
Authors of the Indonesia study have no other history of papers, are claimed to now be deceased (… of COVID)
New Orleans study has n=20
Philippines study was authored by a single doctor in his 20s with a radiology background
This was a bit concerning to me; the first and third are very widely cited, e.g. by Joe Rogan on his podcast.
The further balance of evidence once again convinced me, such as this meta-analysis (which specifically does call out the first and third as possible frauds).
Oh, that’s awfully interesting. I’ve been going out and telling literally everyone I know to buy Vitamin D; is that not universalizable? Is this a “n95 masks” situation where we think it is effective but want to keep mum to protect the most at-risk?
Thinking a bit more—on the margin, it feels like the world should use more VitD (both against Covid and in general) so I’ll continue to beat on my drum. I’d also love to see how you arrived at the few tons per year conclusion!
That’s intriguing. Another news article on Covid/Homeless, I’d love to see more evidence: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-21/why-has-covid-spared-l-a-homeless-people
A more-studied effect on Vitamin D is that of skin color. This is especially seductive since it’s well-established e.g. Black Americans suffer Covid disproportionately, and also are deficient in Vitamin D disproportionately. But the effect seems to disappear after adjusting for confounders:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871402120301156?via%3Dihub#tbl3
I already believed this, but I’m glad that this concept is now written up so I can point to it in the future!
Another frame: A lot of people seem to think “oh, Billy likes cookbooks, I’ll buy him a cookbook since he’ll probably like that”. But that’s exactly backwards! Billy has spent a lot of time figuring out which cookbooks are the best, which ones suit his tastes; it’s very unlikely that your money spent on a cookbook you picked more-or-less at random would be spent nearly as efficiently as if you just gave the money to Billy straight up. Conversely, you would have to spend a lot more effort to research the space of cookbooks to give even a passingly good gift.
Instead, just give him something where you have comparative advantage; something from a hobby you enjoy that is a bit foreign to the recipient. The best gift I ever got was a sketchbook and set of drawing pencils; I know nothing about art, but appreciated the gentle nudge from an experienced artist.
Expanded into a shortform blog post! https://austinsibly.substack.com/p/the-best-gift-i-ever-got
I love all the insights here, and curious—what did you find it to generalize to?
My head’s been on startups lately; reading “enemy” as “competitor” it might be that poaching their employees is worth more than a normal hire? (This was one internal theory about why Google retains so many engineers who don’t do that much). If “supply” is “ideas”, it’s not obvious that copying ideas from the competitor is any better than finding them from any other place, though.
A highly recommended quality-of life improvement is to use ShareX, a program which will let you take a screenshot, immediately upload it to Imgur, then copies the URL link into your clipboard. Sharing, embedding, and backing up anything you see becomes habitual. For example, I hit “Ctrl + Shift + 4”, then “Ctrl + V” and get: https://i.imgur.com/LDclgnH.png
It not only saves me time, it cuts out a trivial inconvenience of showing my screen to others. URLs work universally, and I don’t have to figure out the image upload process of every website everywhere. It’s actually a qualitative change in the type of content I share to e.g. coworkers and friends, and, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.
A chrome extension sounds promising; I wanted a similar tool to help me improve my writing skills. Concretely, I noticed that I would end up hedging a lot in my online conversations, including needless disclaimers like “I think”, “I suppose”, “I guess”, etc. that would detract from the clarity of my writing.
This is a great list! However, I was almost immediately turned off because of
2. Some banks charge you $20 a month for an account, others charge you 0. If you’re with one of the former, have a good explanation for what those $20 are buying.
Because this point is nowhere near top of mind for “tips for better personal finance”. $240 per year should never make or break your life (among people who are reading these comments, anyways), so I’d suggest something more along the lines of:
Make sure you have 3 months of expenses in liquid cash
Store 90% of the rest of your money in an index fund
Experiment with the last 10% (stock picks, prediction markets, crypto, who knows)
The cash-on-time return for getting these basics right is much much higher than switching banks to save a measly $20/month (or e.g. worrying about interest rates on your savings accounts)
First off, I’d like to apologize; I wasn’t trying to gatekeep LessWrong or anything like that. This is part of what’s hard about giving advice online; my mental model of the audience is shaped by the few I know personally + myself, but it’s by no means comprehensive. Some people need to hear “this is specifically how you can save $20/month” and not “this is the general way to approach personal finance”!
That said—I still want to push back. When it comes to personal finance, it’s easy to focus on cutting costs and personal spending; it feels virtuous, and the benefits are visible. But the huge gains in personal finance come from a getting a handful of things very right, almost all of which are related to making more money rather than cutting your costs.In my head, these things are:
Earning a consistent high return on your cash (stock market’s ~10% rather than saving account’s ~0.5%)
Negotiating your salary
Working on your career capital and connections
One intuition for this is the amount of money you can earn is unbounded; no matter who you are, I’d guess you personally know someone making 2x as much, and know of someone who makes 10-100x as much. But the amount of expenses you can cut is hard capped at 100%, and most people would have a pretty difficult time dropping it by even 30%.
And again, it’s hard for me to speak to your financial situation, not knowing you personally; it’s possible your financial strategy matches well to your risk appetite and lifestyle, in which case, please ignore my musings!
That’s a good point, actually; one takeaway from the FIRE (Financially Independent, Retire Early) community is that your retirement date is basically a function of your current expenses; assuming a safe withdrawal rate of 4% you “just” need 25x expenses to retire forever.
But dropping your expenses to zero is fairly hard; in fact, dropping your expenses by any meaningful amount is hard since people have fairly sharp intuitions about where their money is going, and probably not wantonly spending it in the first place.
And moreover, the goal isn’t to extend your personal runway to infinity, but rather to improve the fuzzy metric of “living a happy, fiscally secure life”. Presumably, most of your expenses are reasonably rational purchases on that axis, and getting rid of them would make you less happy overall.
My thesis is that, for the same amount of annoying dealing-with-financial-institutions-effort, setting up an online brokerage account to put the majority of your money in index funds is like 10x to 100x return on effort for many, compared to saving $20 a month switching banks.
This is a really powerful concept; I can immediately think of at least two fields this applies to:
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When you’re not sure how to build a software user interface, you might think “let’s run an A/B test on 1000 people and see which performs better”. But you’ll get 90 percent of the value just by showing it to one or two users and watching them use it, live.
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When you’re learning to cook, one of the first things they teach you is to sample your food throughout. The first sip or bite will immediately tell you how to adjust the recipe (eg add more salt, add something spicy, or a dash of vinegar)
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Great post! One note:
Think in terms of language-to-language translators: to translate really well from language A to language B, you need be masterful at A (to understand all the subtleties of the meaning) and also at B (to convey that meaning while preserving those nuances). That’s why good translators (in both senses) are so rare.
Mastery of both A and B is great, obviously, but if you can choose only one, choose B.
I’ve spent a decent chunk of my life scanlating manga from Japanese to English, and my observation is that fluency in the target language (English, in this case) is much more important for a good translation than fluency in the source. I can overcome a misunderstanding in Japanese with copious amounts of research (Google Translate, JP dictionaries, etc); but the thing that my readers consume is a product in English, which is much harder to “fake”.
Two takeaways, continuing on the translation analogy:
If you want to get into cultural translation, start by writing for the audience you know really well, and then do research into the source culture. My bet is that Scott is more “fluent” in the analytical audience, not the social one.
Scanlation teams often have a JP to Eng translator, fluent in JP, and a second English editor who can clean up the script. Cultural translation may also benefit from two people from different cultures collaborating (SSC’s adversial collaboration comes to mind)
Great article. I think there’s a lot of day-to-day things that we just bumble through in our lives, applying the algorithm of “deal with it the way I dealt with it the very first time I thought about it”. But a 2-minute Google crawl can improve your algorithm immensely. 3 examples that I Googled after reading this article:
Can you eat the leaves on a strawberry? I’d habitually plucked and thrown them away my whole life, but Google says that I can just eat the whole berry!
Should you pop a zit? I’d always done so assuming it would speed up getting over the zit, but Google says letting it heal naturally is overall faster
What’s the correct way of wiping poop? I’d barely ever thought about this daily behavior, doing probably the same motion I’ve done since I was a kid (“fold 3 sheets, wipe once, throw away”), but Google suggests installing a bidet; and failing that, adding a bit of the water to the sheets.
This post was super helpful to me on a number of points, including:
Separating “rejuvenative breaks” from “procrastination spirals”
Encouraging me to track “time since last 1:1 with friend”
Getting social permission to try sending Calendly links to friends
I do somewhat vacillate between the ideas of “willpower is finite, optimize accordingly” presented here, and “screw it, just follow your obsessions” (see two SSC, two PG essays). It’s possible these aren’t actually opposed and that setting up systems frees you to dive deeply into your fascinations… but basically, I wonder how much structure the people we idolize enforce in their day. You do have a ton of blog posts which I’m now enjoying, so that is some positive proof!
One point of confusion: Is the “digital calendar” you mentioned like, Google Calendar? Or a physical, dedicated screen that exists just to surface your calendar?