Admittedly, I didn’t actually follow that rule deliberately to construct Methods
This seems important to note—if I’m reading your post correctly, it seems like you’re piecing together a theory from something that you more-or-less intuitively crafted. As a result, some of the relevant intuition might not have made it into the post. If you’re trying to teach people how to create characters, this might be a red flag for you. If not, this is more of an idle comment.
Suggestion: Change SIAI/CFAR to MIRI/CFAR.
Requested question: “How much money have you donated to organizations aiming to reduce x-risk other than MIRI/CFAR?”
Requested question: “Try to guess the same number that everyone does in the blank below.
People often seem to get these mixed up, resulting in “You want useful beliefs and accurate emotions.”
Thanks for your effort. However, I agree with Ciphergoth that this particular tactic is likely to result in a loss of reputation in those circles that may actually impact x-risks—as a result, I think that it will indirectly increase net x-risk. I feel somewhat awkward advising against this because you’ve already made a public effort towards organizing it, but I am pretty sure that it will have a negative impact.
Consider that one of the odd quirks of human psychology is that people often consider the primary argument made in favor of a proposition to be the best argument for that proposition—namely, they often assume that you’ve made the best argument that you can. However, this setting will not enable you to make a very good argument at all—you can’t overcome very large gaps of inferential distance with 3-4 words on a sign. Even people who might otherwise be receptive to the importance of x-risks will remember “we saw some people waving signs around on the street about that a few days ago”—they’ll be less receptive than they would have been otherwise to more rigorous arguments because you’ve placed yourself in the same reference class as people with much-less-defensible positions.
I appreciate the effort that you’ve put into this—the whole “get people working together to achieve something” is arguably something that we could substantially improve at as a community. However, this is a case where some well-intended actions will have a negative impact compared to no action at all. (Keep in mind, though, that “no action at all” isn’t the relevant counterfactual—what else could you do with the time to generate fuzzies and/or utilons?)
In your base, answering your survey.
Notes (might not want to read unless you’ve already taken the survey):
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In general, this post looks useful and well researched, so upvoted. This is my only problem with it:
Another method is to make failure really painful.
For me personally, this is a really bad idea because it’ll kick me into pain motivation mode and uselessly cause me more stress (decreasing my effectiveness.) You’ve clearly read much more then me on the subject, and so this may work for some people, but I think that it has a chance to significantly backfire for others.
I’m planning to save the world by accumulating a large amount of money and donating it to the most effective charity that I can find.
Two reasons why I currently think this path is best for me:
1) I think that my mind is much better suited to accumulating money than directly working on really hard problems. Decision theory just makes my head hurt.
2) If I change my mind about which charity I consider effective, being a donor allows me to immediately act on my updated beliefs without wasting my past learning. Ex: If I became an FAI researcher and then (after I had spent years learning how to be an effective FAI researcher) decided that life-extension technologies were more effective, I would have to study a bunch of new stuff. If I’m donating, I just send the money to a different place. Curious note: The influence of this factor on my final decision is inversely related to my confidence level in my current judgement.
Edit: I may be wrong about #2; the instrumental utility granted from such may be smaller than I am estimating it to be. However, I think that I have enough of a comparative advantage in making money that even if #2 grants me only a small amount of utility, my decision is likely to remain the same.
I wanted to state this before people began to argue about the merits of #2 (if they did so), because it tends to be irritating when you argue against a proposition and you find out after the fact that the person who initially believed the proposition to be true assigned less importance to its truth than you thought.
My current main selfish takeaway from this is that given the new strain and likely properties of it, I and my loved ones will likely get infected (whereas in the previous world I estimated our precautions as sufficient to prevent infection.)
Hence my main thoughts turn to treatment. I am currently acting on the recommendations provided in the link Zvi previously posted (https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-current-treatment-for-Covid-19) - I would love if anyone has better next actions specifically re treatment than those listed in the Quora response.
To whoever fixed it so that we can see the parents of comments when looking at a user’s comments, major props to you for being awesome.
As there was some interest in Soylent some time ago, I’m curious what people who have some knowledge of dietary science think of its safety and efficacy given that the recipe appears to be finalized. I don’t know much about this area, so it’s difficult for me to sort out the numerous opinions being thrown around concerning the product.
ETA: Bonus points for probabilities or general confidence levels attached to key statements.
I would dislike this relative to the status quo. In my case, I have comparatively little interest in the “stupid questions” thread, and appreciate that the current setup allows me to read the other two threads without having to sort them out.
Thanks for waiting to post this until you’d actually tried it out for a significant length of time.
I sent the Crasche folks an email asking for data documenting the performance of their product. I received the following results as part of a brochure:
LACROSSE CROSS-IMPACT TEST RESULTS (these appear to be stick-to-head):
Sample # Impact Location Cross Velocity (MPH) Severity Index Peak G
Bare Headform Side 38.19 1051 188
Size Small Side 39.94 68 49
Size Large Side 38.64 8 24
LACROSSE BALL IMPACT TEST RESULTS (these appear to be ball-to-head):
Sample # Impact Location Ball Velocity (MPH) Severity Index Peak G
Crosse BXX 1 68.34 278 179
Crosse BXX 2 69.3 208 146
Crosse BXX 3 70.75 294 186
The following sentence was also included in the reply: “Note - these tests are for impact coming onto the head. In a drop test, which simulates a head on collision, a 9 mph event showed an impact reduction of about 25 %.”
For reference, I remember reading somewhere that football helmets tend to increase impact duration from about 3 ms to about 8 ms. Assuming uniform force distribution over the duration of the impact, this amounts to ~60% reduction in peak acceleration (over whatever force domain that acceleration is correct for.) Crasche seems to guard effectively against forces similar to that of a lacrosse stick being swung at the head. Unfortunately, the results of the second test don’t really tell much about the usefulness of the hat, as the Crasche folks seemed to be satisfied with concluding that it’s effective based on seeing a Severity Index (I assume this is based on the head injury criterion?) <300 when taking a lacrosse ball to the head, despite the huge accelerations.
Regarding the drop test − 9 mph gives around 137-82g of acceleration against a hard surface, assuming impact duration of 3-5ms. So we’re looking at 6700-4000N (human head weighs around 5kg). In this domain, we can compare the 25% advertised reduction against the ~60% ballparked estimate for force reduction due to a football helmet.
In summary, the performance appears to be inferior (in terms of pure linear acceleration reduction) to a sports helmet, as one would expect. The hat appears to be more effective against object-to-head impacts (involving smaller forces) relative to impacts that result in the head being brought to a halt from motion (involving larger forces) - perhaps the crushable elements providing the resistance are crushed by the larger forces? My gut says that the performance in a vehicle collision will probably bring the head to a halt against a relatively immobile object, so the hat won’t do much of anything as the crushable bits are crushed too fast to be effective.
Potential metrics which may be helpful to consider (from a previous location search for me to live): Minimum sunlight per month, months under 200 hrs of sunlight, days above 90F, days below 32F, snow/rain days per year, violent crime level, property crime level, number of internet providers, average speed test result of internet providers, top advertised speed of internet providers, quality of healthcare, attends religious services at least once per week, rate of cigarette use, rate of alcohol use, rate of binge drinking.
Some of these are direct metrics on experience (ie number of days where climate makes being outside less pleasant), others towards the end of the list are more proxy metrics of concrete data that may give some indication of general level of religiosity/stress/need for escape in the local environment.
Belongs in Discussion IMO
I’ve looked up a few studies over the past few months in an attempt to understand direct causes of TBI and what kind of accelerations are “safe”—those under which a TBI (or diffuse axonal injury, DAI) is unlikely to occur, and to get a sense of what types of activities different accelerations correspond to. I’m dumping some info below without many citations as it’s much lower effort than the alternative. If there’s anything in particular that one is interested in, I may be able to find the relevant article. if you see anything that is wrong, please let me know.
TBIs appear to be caused by a combination of linear and rotational acceleration; these appear to cause injury via different mechanisms. Linear force/acceleration appears to create a high-pressure volume on the side of impact and a low-pressure volume on the opposite side of the head, with injuries possibly resulting from either. Rotational acceleration can, broadly speaking, cause brain tissues to stretch and twist in a way that they’re not resilient to. However, this only appears to cause direct damage in the most severe of cases. In most cases, the majority of damage appears to be caused by a chemical cascade initially triggered by the damaged tissues. Bleeding of the brain is also possible, though I am not very clear on the causes of this.Regarding the chemical cascade, calcium ions spring to mind as one of the damaging species—curiously, repeatedly recovering from chronic alcohol abuse seems to be contraindicated also due cumulative damage from increased release of calcium ions, and they also may be rather indirectly linked to Alzheimers. More detail on the impacts and causes of calcium ion release in the brain is on my to-learn list.
In severe cases, it appears that hospitals sometimes administer treatment to control intracranial pressure or manage the chemical cascade to reduce damage. (I am not sure whether the focus is on inhibiting the cellular mechanism perpetuating the cascade or neutralizing the offending species themselves.)
Concussions seem to start happening around linear accelerations of ~50g (though one article places this at around 20-30g if I remember correctly, and expresses concern regarding repeated impacts as low as 10g) and/or a rotational acceleration of ~2000 rad/sec^2. Impact durations appear to range from ~3 milliseconds (against a hard surface) to 8 milliseconds (wearing a football helmet). As expected, lateral impacts (from sides, or front/back of head) produce greater rotational acceleration compared to impacts to the top of head. I would personally expect that injuries involving cessation of motion of the head would be hazardous at much lower peak velocities than those involving an object striking the head, as the 1) head is (usually) more massive than the object striking it, resulting in greater net force and 2) neck strength may reduce peak accelerations in the latter case, but perhaps not the former.
These links give examples of accelerations that appear to be produced during assorted daily activities. An experiment was done in which people of various ages shook their heads up/down in an “unconstrained manner”, resulting in peak linear accelerations of ~4-5g and peak rotational accelerations of ~250-500 rad/sec^2. This appears to be somewhat difficult to reconcile with reports of injuries from headbanging, as these accelerations are very much below typically expressed hazardous levels.This article seems to refer to a similar motion, while reaching radically different results regarding accelerations (though, as far as I tell, it only does modeling, no measurement of actual head movement.)
Took the survey. Yvain, thanks for doing this.