ChristianKl

Karma: 24,750

ChristianKl 4 Mar 2021 10:19 UTC
6 points
in reply to: cursed’s comment on: RadVac Commercial Antibody Test Results
My prediction that the anti-body test would come back negative: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/niQ3heWwF6SydhS7R/making-vaccine?commentId=hgwzegWcLEYrZMmZj
You predict nothing of that sort in the linked comment. The antibody test being negative is a distinct event from immunization.
No one took me up on a bet: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/niQ3heWwF6SydhS7R/making-vaccine?commentId=h8mqNdAypszWYQ7dh.
You offered ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ odds for an event that johnswentworth gave 29% likelihood (which was the maximum of anybody giving). It’s quite obvious why nobody takes you up on ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ odds when nobody has a higher then 29% likelihood of believing that the event happens.

ChristianKl 4 Mar 2021 1:05 UTC
11 points
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: A whirlwind tour of Ethereum finance
People hold Bitcoin and Etherum because they want to be able to make a profit on it raising in price. If someone sells their Bitcoin to buy Doge and Bitcoin doubles in price they don’t earn any profit. If they however used the Bitcoin as collateral for a loan, the will make a profit if Bitcoin rises in price.
Vitalik’s explanation of how he made $56,803 on betting on Trump losing on Augur would be one practical case of someone using this method.
Just like Vitalik made profit with using the inefficiency in the Augur prediction market other people are likely using the leveraged capital to make money with the above described yield farming.

ChristianKl 3 Mar 2021 21:04 UTC
2 points
in reply to: nim’s comment on: Attempt at a gears model of getting infected with COVID-19
The total number of myopia doesn’t matter for looking at the difference. Myopia also doesn’t automatically mean glasses. It can also mean contact lenses which are worn less by nerds.

ChristianKl 3 Mar 2021 14:13 UTC
2 points
in reply to: tog’s comment on: Takeaways from one year of lockdown
I’m curious, what countries have and haven’t seen substantial focus on hand hygiene?
Japan has the three C’s of avoiding closed spaces, crowded places and close-contact settings as a main guidance. Japan also performed much better at outcome metrics.

ChristianKl 3 Mar 2021 12:22 UTC
2 points
in reply to: G Gordon Worley III’s comment on: Tap Water and Filtration
So if you’re going to drink tap water, drink cold tap water.
Or buy a water faucet that heats the water instead of taking warm water from a pipe. It also has the other benefit of giving you warm water immediately and a faucet that tells you about the temperature of the water.

ChristianKl 3 Mar 2021 11:58 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Dumbledore's Army’s comment on: We should not raise awareness
Give people some useful knowledge or skill to help reduce the problem. Eg teach women how to examine themselves for lumps and when to seek medical advice.
It’s worth noting it that while this intuitive sounds very good it’s not that clear it actually was good. Doing more testing for breast cancer increased breast cancer diagnoses and breast amputations but it’s not clear that it actually reduced breast cancer deaths.

ChristianKl 3 Mar 2021 11:47 UTC
5 points
in reply to: cata’s comment on: Takeaways from one year of lockdown
I would be very interested to see more people reflecting on situations like this and thinking about what should have been done.
It seems to me that as a community we didn’t do enough investigation of possible solutions. Lockdown, going in denail and then not taking up either Taffix or RaDVaC when those where published seems to be an error in retrospect.
We also should have discussed Nasaleze in February/March.
It seems to me like Bay Area rationalists underestimated the cost and risks that come from locking down so severely. Given the age distribution the one sespsis death might be a similar death risk then everybody getting COVID-19 (maybe even higher). There seems to be a reasoning error about locking down being risk free.

ChristianKl 3 Mar 2021 10:54 UTC
2 points
in reply to: aeviternity1’s comment on: How to end stagnation?
I don’t think the regulatory barrier against mRNA vaccines were completely unreasonable. If we for example at a recent paper that describes the problems with PEGylated anything (including mRNA) from 2019:
The administration of PEGylated drugs can lead to the production of anti-PEG antibodies(anti-PEG immunoglobulin M (IgM)) and immune response (Figure 1) [30]. Due to these phenomena,the PEG-conjugation of drugs/NPs often only provides a biological advantage during the first dose of a treatment course. By the second dose, the PEGylated agents have been recognized by themononuclear phagocyte system in the spleen and liver and are rapidly cleared from circulation.
We now have a way to deliever mRNA a few times per person to people but outside of pandemic conditions it’s unclear why you want to make the few times that you can effectively give mRNA to a person a vaccine that likely could be made is well via established methods at the cost of maybe not being able to give the person later an mRNA cancer treatment because of too much PEG immunogenicity.
The side effects of the second dose of an mRNA vaccines we see currently are higher then the side effects we see from our well tested vaccine formulations.

ChristianKl 3 Mar 2021 10:48 UTC
2 points
in reply to: cata’s comment on: A whirlwind tour of Ethereum finance
Do they work? Is the project credible? Is there demand for this product?
If you do interact with it you should also ask yourself, do you violate security laws if you interact with it? The SEC has a lot of rules and might see trading tokens that mirror stocks as being subject to regulations for stock trading.

ChristianKl 3 Mar 2021 10:13 UTC
2 points
in reply to: jasoncrawford’s comment on: How to end stagnation?
I would expect US leaders to focus more praise US scientists and German leaders putting more praise on German scientists.
It’s not random that all the schools that are named after Jonas Salk are in the US (and I wouldn’t have recognized the name).

ChristianKl 2 Mar 2021 23:49 UTC
2 points
in reply to: nim’s comment on: Attempt at a gears model of getting infected with COVID-19
There’s also the much-talked-about paper on lower COVID rates among glasses-wearers.
I think that could just translate into nerds who spend less time with other people and have an easier time isolating are less likely to get COVID.

ChristianKl 2 Mar 2021 23:49 UTC
2 points
in reply to: nim’s comment on: How to end stagnation?
The lights that most people use today have the same color all day. That results in people getting too much blue light at night which is bad for sleep. They are also too low in intensity so that people get depressed in the winter.
A more modern solution switches to red light in the evening which results in better sleep and gives generally more brightness during the day. Lightbulb also have to change a lot less then previously.
There are many problems that can be solved with result in increased quality of life.
The average American spends 6 hours per week cleaning. If that would be automated by robots it would free up 6 hours that can be spent on more enjoyful activities. Besides time-investment there’s also a lot of interpersonal conflict that comes when things are not as clean as people who cohabit want.
Fast, cheap, nonpoluting and relatively silent robotaxis could increase life quality in a city.

ChristianKl 2 Mar 2021 23:39 UTC
2 points
in reply to: aeviternity1’s comment on: How to end stagnation?
Solving protein folding and related problems might be enough to create a new era of progress. Look at the issues we have with vaccines. If we could run computer simulations that tell us what kind of antibodies the body creates when given different antigens we would gain a lot in vaccine design. That means we could make a lot of progress on a universal flu vaccine and an AIDS vaccine.
Designing protein to catalyse various chemical progresses is also a huge win.

ChristianKl 2 Mar 2021 23:27 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Gerald Monroe’s comment on: How to end stagnation?
restaurant waitstaff, cook—totally unchanged
Ordering at MacDonalds is very different then it was in the past. You can now both order and pay digitally.
For cooks Googling finds https://magazine.rca.asn.au/kitchen-innovations/ . According to it there are various innovations in commencial kitchens like induction cooking.

ChristianKl 2 Mar 2021 23:13 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Gerald Monroe’s comment on: How to end stagnation?
Some tasks, like nuclear plant worker, over time they have become less productive as more of them are needed per megawatt of power, due to more and more long tail risks being discovered.
It’s not just about discovering more tail risks but about having a different culture on risk in those companies. One example someone from the industry gave me is that they tell their workers in yearly seminars about how to avoid cutting themselves with paper.

ChristianKl 2 Mar 2021 23:08 UTC
7 points
on: How to end stagnation?
Celebrate progress. Maybe parades and fireworks are outdated now, but where, for instance, is the acclaim given to the BioNTech founders? Why aren’t they cultural heroes on the level of Jonas Salk?
You do have German mainstream newspapers writing stories like “In zehn Monaten zum Superhelden” (In ten months to superhero) with a picture of Ugur Sahin who funded BioNTech

ChristianKl 2 Mar 2021 22:54 UTC
2 points
in reply to: eillasti’s comment on: RadVac Commercial Antibody Test Results
- they have tried ELISA to measure the blood antibody titers and got some good results (part awesome, part good, part not so good)
Have you asked why that resulting data isn’t public? Is it fear of legal issues of being accused to run clinical trials?

ChristianKl 2 Mar 2021 22:26 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: We should not raise awareness
Some examples of things where “raising awareness” crowds out actually addressing a thing would go a long way toward helping me believe the argument.
In the area of sexual assault the “raising awareness” crowd focuses on narratives like rape culture and makes it very hard for any researcher who wants to study which interventions actually work because when they publish that one intervention that people believe in doesn’t work, they might get attacked for being unwoke.
Nobody, invested into raising awareness of mercury poisoning but they invested into raising the awareness of problems with CO2. The Obama EPA managed to do great work on reducing mercury poisoning but little progress on CO2.
But for most people, direct action isn’t really possible, beyond being more aware of it, supporting it financially, and reacting more compassionately when observed (aka “raised awareness”).
That’s not true. Taking direct action against homelessness is inconvenient but giving a homeless person a couch to sleep on is an action that’s available for many people. I have one friend who actually did that. The amount of impact a person has with taking direct action is a lot higher then that which most people who raise awareness of homelessness have.
More generally it’s however not competition for the same cause. When we focus on those things we can directly affect we do often focus on different causes then if we cause of what we can’t directly affect but for which we can only raise awareness. There are benefits to be gained by people putting their efforts into what they can directly affect.

ChristianKl 2 Mar 2021 21:06 UTC
5 points
on: A whirlwind tour of Ethereum finance
It’s a kind of “whoever notices it first” situation rather than Maker’s slow auction. To me this seems simpler and effective—I wonder why Maker didn’t do it.
It seems to me that in that system however notices it first can extract a lot of value from the lender. The Maker system minimizes the amount of value that the party that clears the defaulted loans can extract so that different vendors compete to provide that service as cheaply as possible.

ChristianKl 2 Mar 2021 20:39 UTC
4 points
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform
The pandemic also has the effect of showing the kind of business ideas people try. It pushes a lot of innovation in food delivery. Some of the pandemic driver innovation will become worthless once the pandemic is over but a few good ideas likely survive and the old ideas of the businesses that went out of business are still around.