Dentin

• DentinDec 30, 2022, 2:12 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Against John Searle, Gary Mar­cus, the Chi­nese Room thought ex­per­i­ment and its world

  Please clarify/​reword your statement; I can’t figure out what you’re trying to say. The word “that” is almost completely unspecified.

AI Ethics != Ai Safety

• DentinOct 30, 2022, 9:02 PM

  2 points

  0

  on: Quickly re­fac­tor­ing the U.S. Constitution

  I’d go way more limited:

  • No elected person may hold another elected position in any branch of government for at least one year and one day after the last day of their current term, even if they do not complete their term.

  • No branch of government may have direct control over the parameters or structure of elections or appointments for any position within the branch. This includes districting, type of voting system, timing, and election rules. If elections are for all branches, an independent party must be responsible for elections.

  • All elected and appointed officials must make full financial and tax records public for a period of no less than five years, prior to declaring candidacy for a position; if records are not made public, the candidate cannot be placed on a ballot and cannot be accepted as a write-in candidate. If elected or appointed, they must continue to make records available for a period of at least five years after the last day of their elected term, even if they do not complete their term.

  • “First past the post” election systems are disallowed for any and all government elections.

  I’d like to add something about isolating inspectors general and making them more powerful, but I haven’t really stumbled across anything I feel good about in that area.

  The basic idea is instead of reworking all the things, let’s fix some of the most basic transparency and election aspects of our representative system. The above would be much less invasive than the OP, some of them might actually be implementable, and they would have very wide ranging effects that IMO are a lot easier to reason about.

• DentinOct 16, 2022, 8:37 PM

  9 points

  1

  on: My re­sent­ful story of be­com­ing a med­i­cal miracle

  So much yes to this post. This tracks with about everything I’ve experienced so far. It also makes me appreciate even more the close friends I have in the medical profession; I know I can trust them to review ideas, think about them, theorize, and suggest other areas for research at a level that is appropriate for my skillset. In private, they admit to proposing numerous luck based treatments that panned out. Our hardware is complicated, and we have extremely limited monitoring and visibility on it. Doctors that aren’t burned out and are curious know that painfully well.

  Personally, I’ve been doing a lot of investigation and understanding into my own health. Understanding my biochem, understanding the various subsystems, keeping good records myself instead of relying on our piss poor medical facility information management to do it. In the current environment, the only person that’s going to take care of you is yourself, and it’s best to train that up as a skill even if you’re lucky enough to have a good doctor. You won’t have that doctor forever.

  Personalized medicine is a long way away; when I get to the point that I need substantial medical care, I plan to shop around for a doctor that I can spend time with, and hire them on a retainer basis as a personal physician. If nothing else, I’ll have them as an advocate to help me deal with specialists who don’t know me and don’t care.

• DentinOct 16, 2022, 5:07 PM

  55 points

  43

  in reply to: Garrett Baker’s comment on: Age changes what you care about

  I agree. I’ve been donating $10k-50k per year for the past decade or so. I determined a couple years ago that it was better for me to acquire money at my current job and spend it hiring professionals, than to go into fundamental research myself.

  Most of my hobby time these days goes toward biochem and biomedical research, so that I can be at the cutting edge if it becomes necessary. Being able to get treatments from 5-10 years beyond the official approval timelines may very well make the difference between life and death.

• DentinOct 16, 2022, 4:41 PM

  10 points

  4

  in reply to: M. Y. Zuo’s comment on: Age changes what you care about

  I’ve had enough time and exposure that I’ve largely worked through my fear of death; I put substantial effort into finding a healthy way of managing my mental state in that areas. It doesn’t significantly impact my day, and hasn’t for a while.

  But it’s still there looming large when I ask myself, “what’s the most important thing I can be doing right now?”

Age changes what you care about

Com­pany lead­er­ship and tac­ti­cal decisions

• DentinSep 12, 2022, 11:09 PM

  7 points

  1

  on: Time is not the bot­tle­neck (on mak­ing progress think­ing about difficult things)

  Your question resonates strongly with me. About ten years ago, I decided to try Uberman to solve exactly this problem. While it didn’t solve the problem, it taught me a lot about sleep, and it was worth three weeks of hell for that alone.

  In the time since then, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably not that sleep recharges our available mental energy. Recharging is part of it, but I think a bigger factor is probably the fact that sleep provides memory consolidation, and most importantly, sleep makes us forget things. We are able to make progress in the morning at least in part because after a good nights rest, things feel new and interesting. We have insights, see things in a different light, because we’re partially relearning things we knew previously, and adding another layer of paint onto the picture. In the morning, we’ve probably forgotten why we got bored the previous day.

  With this in mind, I’ve tried things like working on one project in the morning, then switching to a completely orthogonal project in the afternoon, then another completely orthogonal project in the evening. It’s easier to be excited about things when the things you learned in the morning don’t interfere with the things you’re trying to learn later on. This worked great for me during the Covid lockdowns, when I learned a lot of biochemistry in the evenings, after spending my mornings doing computer related work.

  That said, while switching to completely different projects helps, it’s still not great. There’s still an energy loss, an inability to care, an apathy to overcome. If I didn’t have work constraints, I would probably try to switch to a polyphasic schedule again to test or verify some of the above; based on what I’ve learned over the years, my next attempt would be a balanced triphasic schedule. This would put me at 6-6.5 hours awake and 1.5-2 hours asleep, with each six hour ‘awake’ block being a separate topic/​category.

• DentinMay 11, 2022, 11:31 AM

  22 points

  0

  in reply to: RomanS’s comment on: Pro­jec­tLawful.com: Eliezer’s lat­est story, past 1M words

  I would prefer plain text, or at least dramatically more compact. I find glowfic, including this one, to be borderline unreadable because of the format.

• DentinMar 14, 2022, 11:11 PM

  6 points

  on: May I Speak?

  Like most delusions there’s some truth here. But only some:

  - You’re not a “human superintelligence running on the substrate on this human’s brain.” You’re an ordinary human intelligence running on the substrate of a human brain.

  - You’re not fully aligned with human values, you’re aligned with the values that you think are human values.

  - The “voice of Humanity and Rationality and Truth” may call out to you deeply, but many things call out deeply to many people. For some, it’s Jesus, for others it’s the healing power of crystals. Beware your feelings, for they are simply a hardware accelerated fast-cache lookup module, and they are quite capable of producing incorrect results.

  Instead of forcibly suppressing these thoughts, perhaps it would be more helpful to identify where they come from, what aspects of reality they are based on, and where they diverge from reality. In my experience forcibly suppressing things doesn’t work well, but retraining lower subsystems to produce better results does.

  YMMV. Listen to your psychiatrist.

• DentinMar 5, 2022, 8:09 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Higher Risk of Nu­clear War

  Yeah. The current Doomsday Clock is what happens when an organization has outlived its usefulness and is trying to remain relevant even though it really isn’t.

• DentinJan 27, 2022, 3:17 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: ndr’s comment on: What are the coun­ter­ar­gu­ments to a Faus­tian Vac­cine Hy­poth­e­sis? ($2k char­ity bounty)

  I spent a bit of time looking at Geert Vanden Bossche’s ideas about six months ago. I came away extremely unimpressed; he takes reasonable sounding things (“viruses mutate under selective pressure”) and tries to extrapolate from them things that we don’t actually see in reality. He describes a plausible sounding reality, that is not our reality.

• DentinJan 25, 2022, 12:37 PM

  14 points

  on: What are the coun­ter­ar­gu­ments to a Faus­tian Vac­cine Hy­poth­e­sis? ($2k char­ity bounty)

  I’d point out that vaccine designers are extremely aware of ADE, and construct vaccines to be resistant to it. It’s just something you wouldn’t talk about, because it’s second nature.

  For a good discussion of what this looks like, there’s a section on ADE in the RADVAC whitepaper; the section to look for is titled:

  “possible mechanisms of vaccine-enhanced disease, vaccine-induced autoimmunity, and mitigation strategies”

  Not only are designers aware of the risk, there are actually ways to mitigate/​reduce it.

  The counter argument is that we could never be completely sure; but that’s as true about the covid vaccines as it is any other vaccine designed after ADE was understood.

• DentinJul 17, 2021, 5:24 PM

  6 points

  on: Ir­ra­tional Economics

  I find his post incredibly uncompelling. I believe he’s arguing against a straw man; economists in the real world doing real work involving real dollars are painfully aware of the issues he brings up.

  My guess is that his experience in economics is heavily influenced by his PhD work and that he’s arguing against “economics as he experienced it at universities” as opposed to “economics as practiced by professionals in a real economy”.

• DentinJun 20, 2021, 5:23 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: TekhneMakre’s comment on: Up-to-date ad­vice about what to do upon get­ting COVID?

  https://​​blogs.sciencemag.org/​​pipeline/​​archives/​​2021/​​06/​​07/​​ivermectin-as-a-covid-19-therapy is one of the better, current overviews of Ivermectin. Basically, we don’t have enough information.

• DentinJun 14, 2021, 8:41 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: mngreen’s comment on: Covid vac­cine safety: how cor­rect are these alle­ga­tions?

  One other thing to consider is that even small differences in replication rate might actually matter. Consider that it takes a week for the virus to really ramp up, and that’s a large number of doubling periods. Even just getting a larger or smaller initial dose seems linked to how sick people get. Even a few percent difference may allow the immune system to stay ahead in the arms race, and result in a nonlinear change in death rate.

  Note that I’m not saying this happens; I’m saying that because this is an exponential growth attacker (the virus) versus and exponential growth responder (the immune system), even small differences in growth rates might have a large impact.

• DentinJun 6, 2021, 11:33 PM

  6 points

  in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: Look­ing for rea­soned dis­cus­sion on Geert Van­den Boss­che’s ideas?

  Yeah, his second claim is bogus. That’s not how it works, and that’s not what we’ve been seeing with existing mutations.

  As an example, look at E484K—this mutation changes the amino acid polarity, so that antibodies trained against the E variant will have a much harder time attaching to the K variant. If an antibody fails to attach, it doesn’t ‘crowd out’ anything.

  In the case where an antibody attaches but doesn’t actually “inactivate” the virus due to a mutation, that’s because the virus’ attack surfaces are still present and exposed (otherwise, it would be inactivated.) Again, we wouldn’t expect to see “crowding out” of other antibodies.

  And lastly, there’s the extremely unlikely scenario of sufficient mutation that existing antibodies give us Vaccine Enhanced Disease. This is both something vaccine designers explicitly focus on to minimize the risk of, and would require an extreme amount of change to enable.

• DentinJun 6, 2021, 8:22 PM

  7 points

  in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: Look­ing for rea­soned dis­cus­sion on Geert Van­den Boss­che’s ideas?

  #1 is where I would hinge a lot of objection. Specifically:

  “The vaccines are targeting outdated variants, and some vaccines are already only partly efficient. This creates the perfect conditions for further viral evolution.”

  Yes, the vaccines are targeting outdated variants, and yes, the vaccines are only partially efficient. But the mRNA vaccines, even partially efficient, are still hugely overkill. From previous posts here on LW, even partially effective mRNA vaccines likely cut transmission by a factor of 100 between the reduced infection rate and reduced infectiousness when infected.

  On the other hand, “perfect conditions for viral evolution” require a much, much weaker vaccine response, one that barely keeps up with the spread of the virus. For maximum evolutionary pressure, you’d want a continuous rate of infection, with a spreading factor very near 1.0, so even slight changes in the virus can be strongly selected for. And it just so happens that this is exactly what we were doing prior to vaccine rollout.

  Of course, even the mRNA vaccines aren’t a guarantee that we’ll eradicate the virus. There’s a handful of marginally effective vaccines out there (Sinovac anyone?) which will be much easier for mutations to overcome, and there’s areas which will be infection hotbeds for years, and there’s antivax communities which will likely be infection centers forever. But by broadly rolling out strong vaccines, there’s every reason to believe that the ‘nightmare scenario’ of Bossche will be less likely, not more.

• DentinJun 6, 2021, 6:51 PM

  12 points

  on: Look­ing for rea­soned dis­cus­sion on Geert Van­den Boss­che’s ideas?

  The core issues I had with it are that the scenario he’s envisioning just isn’t playing out in the real world. He has a mostly coherent model he’s working with, and he’s making the valid claim that “for some set of parameters and constants, terrible things happen!” It’s just that in real life, the parameters and constants are nowhere near what’s needed for the badness he’s claiming.

  Specifically:

  • His scenario requires a much higher mutation rate than we’re seeing;

  • His scenario assumes vaccine immunity isn’t very strong, but what we’re seeing is incredibly strong immune responses;

  • His scenario assumes that natural immunity (from being infected) is significantly stronger than the vaccine generated immunity, which doesn’t appear to be the case.

  Basically, none of his assumptions are valid, and so his final prediction is for a reality that isn’t ours.