I’ve run Hamming circles within CFAR contexts a few times, and once outside. Tips from outside:
Timing can be tricky here! If you do 4x 20m with breaks, and you’re doing this in an evening, then by the time you get to the last person, people might be tired.
Especially so if you started with the Hamming Questions worksheet exercise (link as prereq at top of post).
I think next time I would drop to 15 each, and keep the worksheet.
Thanks for the writeup! The first paper covers the first half of the video series, more or less. I’ve been working on a second paper which will focus primarily on the induction bump phenomenon (and other things described in the second half of the video series), so much more to come there!
I appreciate the concept of “Numerical-Emotional Literacy”. In fact, this is what I personally think/feel the “rationalist project” should be. To the extent I am a “rationalist” then precisely specifically what I mean by that is that knowing what I value, and pursuing numerical-emotional literacy around it, is important to me.
To make in-line adjustments, grab a copy of the spreadsheet (https://www.microcovid.org/spreadsheet) and do anything you like to it!
Also, if you live alone and don’t have any set agreements with anyone else, then the “budgeting” lens is sort of just a useful tool to guide thinking. Absent pod agreements, as an individual decisionmaker, you should just spend uCoV when it’s worth the tradeoff, and not when it’s not.
You could think about it as an “annualized” risk, more than an “annual” risk; more like “192 points per week, in a typical week, on average” and it kind of amortizes out, and less like “you have 10k and once you spend it you’re done”
There is now a wired article about this tool and the process of creating it: https://www.wired.com/story/group-house-covid-risk-points/
I think the reporter did a great job of capturing what an “SF group house” is like and how to live a kind of “high IQ / high EQ” rationalist-inspired live, so this might be a thing one could send to friends/family about “how we do things”.
It’s not just Dario, it’s a larger subset of OpenAI splitting off: “He and a handful of OpenAI colleagues are planning a new project, which they tell us will probably focus less on product development and more on research. We support their move and we’re grateful for the time we’ve spent working together.”
I heard someone wanted to know about usage statistics for the microcovid.org calculator. Here they are!
Sorry to leave you hanging for so long Richard! This is the reason why in the calculator we ask about “number of people typically near you at a given time” for the duration of the event. (You can also think of this as a proxy for “density of people packed into the room”.) No reports like that that I’m aware of, alas!
Want to just give credit to all the non-rationalist coauthors of microcovid.org! (7 non-rationalists and 2 “half-rationalists”?)
I’ve learned a LOT about the incredible power of trusted collaborations between “hardcore epistemics” folks and much more pragmatic folks with other skillsets (writing, UX design, medical expertise with ordinary people as patients, etc). By our powers combined we were able to build something usable by non-rationalist-but-still-kinda-quantitative folks, and are on our way to something usable by “normal people” 😲.
We’ve been able to get a lot more scale of distribution/usage/uptake with a webapp, than if we had just released a spreadsheet & blogpost. And coauthors put everything I wrote through MANY rounds of extensive writing/copy changes to be more readable by ordinary folks. We get feedback often that we’ve changed someone’s entire way of thinking about risks and probabilities. This has surprised and delighted me. And I think the explicit synthesis between rationalist and non-rationalist perspectives on the team has been directly helpful.
Also, don’t forget to factor in “kicking off a chain of onwards infections” into your COVID avoidance price somehow. You can’t stop at valuing “cost of COVID to *me*”.
We don’t really know how to do this properly yet, but see discussion here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MACKemu3CJw7hcJcN/microcovid-org-a-tool-to-estimate-covid-risk-from-common?commentId=v4mEAeehi4d6qXSHo#No5yn8nves7ncpmMt
Sadly nothing useful. As mentioned here (https://www.microcovid.org/paper/2-riskiness#fn6) we think it’s not higher than 10%, but we haven’t found anything to bound it further.
“I’ve heard people make this claim before but without explaining why. [...] the key risk factors for a dining establishment are indoor vs. outdoor, and crowded vs. spaced. The type of liquor license the place has doesn’t matter.”
I think you’re misunderstanding how the calculator works. All the saved scenarios do is fill in the parameters below. The only substantial difference between “restaurant” and “bar” is that we assume bars are places people speak loudly. That’s all. If the bar you have in mind isn’t like that, just change the parameters.
entry-level leadership
It has become really salient to me recently that good practice involves lots of prolific output in low-stakes throwaway contexts. Whereas a core piece of EA and rationalist mindsets is steering towards high-stakes things to work on, and treating your outputs as potentially very impactful and not to be thrown away. In my own mind “practice mindset” and “impact mindset” feel very directly in tension.
I have a feeling that something around this mindset difference is part of why world-saving orientation in a community might be correlated with inadequate opportunities for low-stakes leadership practice.
Here’s another further-afield steelman, inspired by blameless postmortem culture.
When debriefing / investigating a bad outcome, it’s better for participants to expect not to be labeled as “bad people” (implicitly or explicitly) as a result of coming forward with information about choices they made that contributed to the failure.
More social pressure against admitting publicly that one is contributing poorly contributes to systematic hiding/obfuscation of information about why people are making those choices (e.g. incentives). And we need all that information to be out in the clear (or at least available to investigators who are committed & empowered to solve the systemic issues), if we are going to have any chance of making lasting changes.
In general, I’m curious what Zvi and Ben think about the interaction between “I expect people to yell at me if I say I’m doing this” and promoting/enabling “honest accounting”.
Another distinction I think is important, for the specific example of “scientific fraud vs. cow suffering” as a hypothetical:
Science is a terrible career for almost any goal other than actually contributing to the scientific endeavor.
I have a guess that “science, specifically” as a career-with-harmful-impacts in the hypothetical was not specifically important to Ray, but that it was very important to Ben. And that if the example career in Ray’s “which harm is highest priority?” thought experiment had been “high-frequency-trading” (or something else that some folks believe has harms when ordinarily practiced, but is lucrative and thus could have benefits worth staying for, and is not specifically a role of stewardship over our communal epistemics) that Ben would have a different response. I’m curious to what extent that’s true.
One distinction I see getting elided here:
I think one’s limited resources (time, money, etc) are a relevant question in one’s behavior, but a “goodness budget” is not relevant at all.
For example: In a world where you could pay $50 to the electric company to convert all your electricity to renewables, or pay $50 more to switch from factory to pasture-raised beef, then if someone asks “hey, your household electrical bill is destroying the environment, why didn’t you choose the green option”, a relevant reply is “because I already spent my $50 on cow suffering”.
However, if both options cost $0, then “but I already switched to pasture-raised beef” is just irrelevant in its entirety.
The recent EA meta fund announcement linked to this post (https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/blog/the-fidelity-model-of-spreading-ideas ) which highlights another parallel approach: in addition to picking idea expressions that fail gracefully, to prefer transmission methods that preserve nuance.
A “Core Views on AI Safety” post is now available at https://www.anthropic.com/index/core-views-on-ai-safety
(Linkpost for that is here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xhKr5KtvdJRssMeJ3/anthropic-s-core-views-on-ai-safety.)