DonGeddis

Karma: 329

DonGeddis 30 Dec 2021 17:31 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Zvi’s comment on: Omicron: My Current Model
I had the same reaction as Elizabeth. The data I’ve seen suggests that the key variable is “time since last dose”. Vaccines protect against severe disease and death very well, possibly for years. But protection against infection specifically appears to peak about a month after your last dose, and drop to (around) zero about six months after your last dose.
Are you sure you’re not confusing a time sequence here, with quantity or quality? Your sentence suggests that there is something “different” about getting a booster (but it’s the same physical entity as the first two doses!). And even now, you say “three is better than a fresh two”. Do you have a reference for that, in particular to distinguish recency from quantity?
To be concrete, I would strongly suspect that, six months after these latest boosters, you AGAIN have very little protection against infection.
This chart was from before omicron (Aug 2021), but I’m not aware of any major changes in the data: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2021/08/27/2021.08.25.21262584/F2.large.jpg
(From: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.25.21262584v1.full )

DonGeddis 12 Nov 2017 18:51 UTC
4 points
in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: Living in an Inadequate World
“But raising nominal prices is economically useless” No, that’s not true. Raising nominal prices helps with sticky wages & debts. Failing to raise nominal prices causes recession, unemployment, and bankruptcies.
“the healthy inflation” That phrase doesn’t refer to anything. “Healthy” isn’t a modifier that applies to “inflation”. There is only one single thing: the change in the overall price level. There aren’t “healthy” and “non-healthy” versions of that one thing.
“One could add 000 behind each prices number” No, you’re likely thinking of a different hypothetical, something like an overnight currency devaluation. In those cases, wage and debt contracts are simultaneously converted from the “old peso” into the “new peso”. That’s a very, very different macroeconomic event. “Printing money”, on the other hand, changes the prices of goods … but sticky wage and debt contracts are unaffected (and thus devalued). It is exactly the fact that only some but not all prices are changed by central bank money printing, that causes “raising nominal prices” to have an effect on the real economy. (Exactly as you suggest, if all prices changed simultaneously, the real economy would be unaffected. It’s important to understand that central bank money printing is very different.)

DonGeddis 12 Nov 2017 18:45 UTC
5 points
in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: Living in an Inadequate World
You mostly seem to be noticing that there is a difference between the nominal economy (the numbers on the prices), and the real economy (what resources you can buy with currency). That’s certainly true—but actually beside the point. Because the point is that inflation (actually, NGDP) below trend, causes “business-cycle” recessions. The reason is that many contracts (wages, debts) are written in nominal terms, and so when the value of the Unit of Account (function of money) changes in an unexpected way, these fixed nominal contracts don’t adjust quickly enough. The result is disequilibrium, rising unemployment and bankruptcies, etc. The fix is to keep nominal prices rising on trend.
Having exchange rates fall, or gold or asset prices rise, is an independent thing. It only matters if the currency begins to be abandoned (as you suggest with dollar prices in Russia), and especially if wage and debt contracts begin to be written in a different Unit of Account. It is stability in the value of the Unit of Account which affects macroeconomic stability.
Summary: “printing money could increase prices” is the whole point, and it doesn’t matter if “prices fall in a harder currency” or there is “deflation in gold and bitcoin prices”. As long as the local currency is the Unit of Account, then changes in the value of the local currency (aka local currency aggregate demand) are what matter.

DonGeddis 14 Apr 2010 19:10 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Jack’s comment on: Undiscriminating Skepticism

There is zero net evidence that IQ correlates with skin tone.

That’s not true at all. There is overwhelming evidence that performance on IQ tests is hugely correlated with “race”, which basically implies skin tone. Blacks, as a group, score 10-15 points below whites (almost a standard deviation), and (some) Asians and Jews are about half a deviation above whites.

The controversy is not whether there is correlation. The controversy is over the casual explanation. How much of this observed difference is due to genetics, how much due to environment, and how much due to the structure of standard IQ tests?

Mainstream science either holds that there is no genetic component or that the question is unresolved.

Just to clarify: the question is whether there is a genetic component to the observed difference in black/white (and other racial) group IQ scores.

There is clearly a genetic component to individual IQ scores.

This varies based on wealth. Among poor/impoverished peoples, variance in IQ scores is something like 60-90% due to environmental factors (like nutrition). Among wealthy peoples, 60-70% seems to be genetic.

The usual analogy is the height of growing corn. In nutrient-poor dirt, corn height is mostly a function of how much fertilizer/water/sun the plants get. But in well-tended farms, corn stalk height is almost completely a function of inherited genetics.

DonGeddis 5 Apr 2010 20:14 UTC
12 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Open Thread: April 2010
A “Jedi”? Obi-Wan Kenobi?

I wonder if you mean old Ben Kenobi. I don’t know anyone named Obi-Wan, but old Ben lives out beyond the dune sea. He’s kind of a strange old hermit.

DonGeddis 19 Mar 2010 23:27 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Let There Be Light
Bostrom and Sandberg (in your linked paper) suggest three reasons why we might want to change the design that evolution gave us:
- Changed tradeoffs. We no longer live in the ancestral environment.
- Value discordance. Evolution’s goal may not match our own.
- Evolutionary restrictions. We might have tools that were not available to evolution.
On #2, I’ll note that evolution designed humans as temporary vessels, for the goal of propagating genes. Not, for example, for the goal of making you happy. You may prefer to hijack evolution’s design, in service of your own goals, rather than in service of your gene’s reproduction.

Lots of evolution’s adaptations (including many of the biases we discuss) are good for the propagation of the genes, at the cost of being bad for the individual human who suffers the bias. A self-aware human may wish to choose to reverse that tradeoff.

DonGeddis 17 Mar 2010 20:26 UTC
11 points
in reply to: zemaj’s comment on: Living Luminously

introspection can’t be scientific by definition

What you observe via introspection, is not accessible to third parties, yes.

But you use those observations to build models of yourself. Those models can be made explicit and communicated to others. And they make predictions about your future behavior, so they can be tested.

DonGeddis 17 Mar 2010 19:01 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Jack’s comment on: Undiscriminating Skepticism
Most people’s moral gut reactions say that humans are very important, and everything else much less so. This argument is easier to make “objective” if humans are the only things with everlasting souls.

Once you get rid of souls, making the argument that humans have some special moral place in the world becomes much more difficult. It’s probably an argument that is beyond the reach of the average person. After all, in the space of “things that one can construct out of atoms”, humans and goldfish are very, very close.

DonGeddis 17 Mar 2010 17:56 UTC
18 points
in reply to: simplicio’s comment on: Undiscriminating Skepticism

Is an abortion an “ok if regrettable practice?” You’ve just assumed the answer is always yes, under any circumstances.

Sorry, you have a point that my test won’t apply to every rationalist.

The contrast I meant was: if you look at the world population, and ask how many people believe in atheism, materialism, and that abortion is not morally wrong, you’ll find a significant minority. (Perhaps you yourself are not in that group.)

But if you then try to add “believes that infanticide is not morally wrong”, your subpopulation will drop to basically zero.

But, rationally, the gap between the first three beliefs, and the last one, is relatively small. Purely on the basis of rationality, you ought to expect a smaller dropoff than we in fact see. Hence, most people in the first group are avoiding the repugnant conclusion for non-rational reasons. (Or believing in the first three, for non-rational reasons.)

If you personally don’t agree with the first three premises, then perhaps this test isn’t accurate for you.

DonGeddis 17 Mar 2010 17:49 UTC
4 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Undiscriminating Skepticism
Your parenthetical comment is the funniest thing I’ve read all day! The contrast with the seriousness of subject matter is exquisite. (You’re of course right about the marginal cases thing too.)

DonGeddis 16 Mar 2010 22:06 UTC
31 points
on: Undiscriminating Skepticism
Proposed litmus test: infanticide.

General cultural norms label this practice as horrific, and most people’s gut reactions concur. But a good chunk of rationality is separating emotions from logic. Once you’ve used atheism to eliminate a soul, and humans are “just” meat machines, and abortion is an ok if perhaps regrettable practice … well, scientifically, there just isn’t all that much difference between a fetus a couple months before birth, and an infant a couple of months after.

This doesn’t argue that infants have zero value, but instead that they should be treated more like property or perhaps like pets (rather than like adult citizens). Don’t unnecessarily cause them to suffer, but on the other hand you can choose to euthanize your own, if you wish, with no criminal consequences.

Get one of your friends who claims to be a rationalist. See if they can argue passionately in favor of infanticide.
What links here?
- Multiheaded's comment on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) by orthonormal (3 Jan 2012 17:47 UTC; 2 points)

DonGeddis 15 Mar 2010 23:55 UTC
5 points
in reply to: taw’s comment on: Undiscriminating Skepticism
Do you have the same opinion about gender-linked “genetically-based behavioral variation”?

Not to open a can of worms here, but the pickup-artist (PUA) community is all about how the innate behavior of (generally heterosexual) men and women differ, in dating scenarios. And, in particular, how those real behaviors differ from the behavior that is taught and reinforced by society and culture.

You can have an opinion that all behavior is changeable, and that it is shaped by society and culture. But that would lead you to one model of how men and women act during dating. (In particular, to a mostly gender-neutral model.) The PUA community has a different model of human dating behavior … and I would say that theirs is a good deal more accurate at predicting actual observed behavior in the field.

DonGeddis 15 Mar 2010 17:34 UTC
0 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: The Importance of Goodhart’s Law
You are correct, that not all activity recorded in GDP is welfare-enhancing. (Note that GDP also underreports some positive welfare activities.)

But that’s not the important point. The important point is: does the difference between the GDP measure, and some more accurate measure, have any implications for economic policy? The answer seems to be no: attempts have been made to define more precise welfare-tracking measures of national welfare, and the result seems to be that they track GDP very closely, and that there is basically no implication for policy decisions.

(Perhaps try an analogy? To oversimplify, in dermatology there are millions of different infections you might get on your skin, but roughly speaking only a small handful of possible treatments. A good doctor doesn’t attempt expensive diagnostics to figure out exactly what you have; the proper medical treatment is only to distinguish what general class of infection you have, so that the correct treatment can be applied from the small possibilities. Similarly, GDP is easy to measure, and results in pretty much the correct policy suggestions. Anecdotes of how it is not perfect, are only important in so far as they would imply different policy choices, when they usually don’t.)

DonGeddis 14 Mar 2010 17:40 UTC
−3 points
on: The Importance of Goodhart’s Law
It’s true that GDP is not identical to national welfare. And you can come up with anecdotes where some welfare measure isn’t fully captured by GDP (both positive and negative).

But GDP is useful, because it is very hard to game. The examples in your “fetishism” link are very weak. Unlike the nails example, where we can all agree that the factory made the wrong choice for society, it is far from clear that the GDP examples resulted in the wrong policy, even if GDP is only an approximation for welfare.

GDP is not a good example of Goodhart’s Law. It’s nothing at all like the (broken) correlation between inflation and unemployment, which varies widely depending on policy choices.

DonGeddis 17 Feb 2010 4:18 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Psy-Kosh’s comment on: Open Thread: February 2010, part 2
“SA”?

DonGeddis 8 Feb 2010 5:20 UTC
3 points
on: A survey of anti-cryonics writing
“Pseudoscience” isn’t the only possible criticism of cryonics. One could believe that it may be scientifically possible in theory, still without thinking that it’s a good idea to sign up for cryonics in the present day. (Basically, by coming up with something like a Drake equation for the chance of it working out positively for a current-day human, and then estimating the probability of the terms to be very low.)

You’re right, that most of the popular criticism of cryonics is mere non-technical mocking. Still, there’s a place for reasoned objections as well.

DonGeddis 1 Feb 2010 23:52 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Open Thread: February 2010
With a straightforward interpretation of your question, I’d answer “95%”.

But since you made special mention of being “sneaky”, I’ll assume you’ve attempted to trick me into misunderstanding the question, and so I’ll lower my probability estimate to 75%, with the missing twenty points accounting for you tricking me by your phrasing of the question.

DonGeddis 31 Jan 2010 20:07 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Toby_Ord’s comment on: Complexity of Value ≠ Complexity of Outcome
I, for one, am interested in hearing arguments against anti-realism.

If you don’t have personal interest in writing up a sketch, that’s fine. Might you have some links to other people who have already done so?

DonGeddis 13 Jan 2010 0:21 UTC
5 points
in reply to: roland’s comment on: The things we know that we know ain’t so
It’s true that climate is too complex to predict well. Still, I haven’t heard many global warming worriers warn about the threat of a new ice age. It’s all about the world actually becoming warmer.

Given that, the real problem seems to be the speed. If it took 1000 years to raise 5 degrees, that might not be so bad. If it’s 50 years, the necessary adjustments (to both humans and non-humans) might only happen with massive die-off.

But leaving aside the speed, it’s not insane to notice that there is vastly more biodiversity in the tropics, than in the arctic. If you were designing a planet for humans to live on, a little warmer is a whole lot better than a little colder.

This doesn’t mean that global warming is “good”. But you shouldn’t dismiss the positive changes out of hand, when evaluating the future pros and cons.

DonGeddis 13 Jan 2010 0:12 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Aurini’s comment on: The things we know that we know ain’t so
There are (bad) interpretations of QM, where they do mean “conscious” observer. This objection is very close to saying that MWI (multiple worlds) is “right”, and the others are “wrong”.

That may be the case, but it is far from universally acknowledged among practicing physicists. So, it’s a bit unfair to suggest this “error”, given that many prominent (but wrong) physicists would not agree that it is an error.