jacobjacob

• jacobjacob 13 Apr 2021 21:41 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: niplav’s comment on: Book Re­view: The Se­cret Of Our Success

  Strange indeed… but, here is a working version:

• jacobjacob 11 Apr 2021 19:27 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: Unnamed’s comment on: Monastery and Throne

  I had nudging cached in my memory as, more or less, a UX movement.

  Want to increase charity donation at your company? Make it opt-out, rather than opt-in. Want to increase completion rates of your survey? Make it shorter.

  And so forth.

  So I was surprised by Jacob Falkovich claiming that nudgerism caused the elaborate psychological theorising used to inform covid policy. Many such policies mostly seemed to be about oddly specific, second-order claims. Like, in the case of expected resistance to challenge trials, or vaccine hesitancy. Those arguments venture more heavily into psychoanalysing people; rather than appealing to simple behavioural economics and basic UX.

  (My cached memory of the nudge movement might be too narrow, though)

• jacobjacob 11 Apr 2021 19:18 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Monastery and Throne

  Habryka, is the reasoning that politicians have a real incentive to accurately predict public response—because it entirely determines whether they remain in power—whereas behavioral scientists have a much weaker incentive, compared to the dominant incentive of publishing significant results?

• jacobjacob 9 Apr 2021 12:03 UTC

  2 points

  on: Holy Grails of Chemistry

  I haven’t looked at the links, but making problem lists like this seems really cool. I’m glad they tried it, and then followed up.

  I’m curious whether you know anything about why they tried it?

  Hamming’s original lecture talks about how most scientists he had lunch with sort of flinched away from their field’s Hamming problems. He asked why they weren’t working on them. It’s implied that the conversation usually didn’t go down very well, and the next day he had to eat lunch with someone else.

  Why were things different for the Accounts of Chemical Research people? Unusual amounts of curiosity, courage, accident, or something else?

• jacobjacob 7 Apr 2021 19:15 UTC

  2 points

  on: Willpower

  There is an argument that the use of willpower is undesirable.

  Would be good to add a source.

• jacobjacob 15 Mar 2021 12:21 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Brains and back­prop: a key timeline crux

  I’m currently on vacation, but I’d be interested in setting up a call once I’m back in 2 weeks! :) I’ll send you my calendly in PM

• jacobjacob 15 Mar 2021 9:56 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Brains and back­prop: a key timeline crux

  I appreciate you following up on this!

  The sad and honest truth, though, is that since I wrote this post, I haven’t thought about it. :( I haven’t picked up on any key new piece of evidence—though I also haven’t been looking.

  I could give you credences, but that would mostly just involve rereading this and loading up all the thoughts

• jacobjacob 9 Mar 2021 6:20 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Brooster’s comment on: What other pep­tide vac­cines might it be use­ful to make?

  gum disease represents a very large and growing cause of both morbidity and economic burden for people in all economic situations.

  Curious if you have some links for data/​calculations on the disease burden?

  Also, do we have a reason to believe this is an area where peptide vaccines would be especially helpful?

• jacobjacob 4 Mar 2021 6:17 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: What other pep­tide vac­cines might it be use­ful to make?

  I went down the neoantigen rabbithole, and it was quite interesting.

  I liked this talk on “Developing Personalized Neoantigen-Based Cancer Vaccines”.

  It seems a core part of their methodology is using machine learning to predict which peptides will elicit a T-cell response, based on sequencing the patient’s tumour. (Discussed starting from around 11 minutes in.)

  They use this algorithm, which seems to be a neural network with a single hidden layer just ~60 neurons wide, and some amount of handcrafting of input features (based on papers from 2003 and 2009). I wonder what one could accomplish with more modern tools (though I haven’t yet read the papers deeply enough to have a model of how big of a bottleneck this is to creating an effective treatment, and how much room for improvement there is).

• jacobjacob 3 Mar 2021 18:53 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: gjm’s comment on: What other pep­tide vac­cines might it be use­ful to make?

  I’m updating fairly hard on the four radvac team members who found antibodies using custom-built ELISA assays (rather than commercial tests). I wasn’t super compelled by arguments that those might be false positives, but I do find it important that we don’t know the denominator off how many of them took that test.

  It maybe moved my probability from 17% to 45% that it would work for me (so still less optimistic than Wentworth!)

  Though I think even a 5% chance of it working would make the original question worth asking. As they say: huge if true :)

  (Also, the more competent version of me who solved it in a month would need to be competent on many other dimensions as well, not just knowing about peptide vaccines. Thinking about it, just the peptide delivery time could be longer than a month, as could the vaccine booster schedule. I do think there are worlds where it’s actually a month, but I’ll update the question to say “a few”)

[Question] What other pep­tide vac­cines might it be use­ful to make?

• jacobjacob 3 Mar 2021 3:28 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: eillasti’s comment on: Mak­ing Vaccine

  <1%, because RaDVaC team has tried it and didn’t manage to get any positive result.

  That’s false, they got several positive anitbody results in ~June or so last year. See a comment elsewhere on this post.

• jacobjacob 23 Feb 2021 0:52 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Anna Czarnota’s comment on: Mak­ing Vaccine

  Curious if anyone ended up running this process, and, if so, what your results were?

• jacobjacob 12 Feb 2021 20:35 UTC

  6 points

  on: Po­ten­tial fac­tors in Bell Labs’ in­tel­lec­tual progress, Pt. 1

  This actually flies against my sense that Bell Labs was able to build the transistor because of their resources and build-up of particular knowledge and expertise they had after 20-years. Possibly their ideas were just getting spread around via their external contacts, or actually, solid-state physics was taking off generally.

  Woah, this was striking to me. It seems like pretty big evidence against Bell Labs actually having a secret sauce of enabling intellectual progress. I would have to look into it more, though. (Also the update is tempered by the fact that another argument for Bell Labs’ greatness is the sheer number of inventions, like UNIX, satellites, lasers, information theory, and other stuff.)

• jacobjacob 9 Feb 2021 3:19 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: jacobjacob’s comment on: Mak­ing Vaccine

  @Davidmanheim you’re a pretty big outlier here, and this is also the kind of question where I’d trust your judgement a fair bit:

  

  So curious if you wanted to elaborate a bit on your model?

• jacobjacob 8 Feb 2021 2:25 UTC

  60 points

  on: Mak­ing Vaccine

  Well, this post was just crying out for some embedded predictions! So here we go:

  Thanks johnswentworth for help with some of the operationalisations!

  I included many different ones, as I think it is often good try to triangulate high stakes questions via different operationalisations. This reduces some some “edge-case noise” stemming from answering vague questions in overly specific ways.

  What links here?

  • RadVac Com­mer­cial An­ti­body Test Results by johnswentworth (26 Feb 2021 18:04 UTC; 228 points)

• jacobjacob 30 Jan 2021 4:53 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: GuySrinivasan’s comment on: Pseu­do­ran­dom­ness con­test: prizes, re­sults, and analysis

  Yep, this is indeed a reason proper scoring rules don’t remain proper if 1) you only have a small sample size of questions, and 2) utility of winning is not linear in the points you obtain (for example, if you really care about being in the top 3, much more than any particular amount of points).

  Some people have debated whether it was happening in the Good Judgement tournaments. If so, that might explain why extremizing algorithms improved performance. (Though I recall not being convinced that it was actually happening there). When Metaculus ran its crypto competition a few years ago they also did some analysis to check if this phenomenon was present, yet they couldn’t detect it.

• jacobjacob 29 Jan 2021 2:13 UTC

  12 points

  on: Pseu­do­ran­dom­ness con­test: prizes, re­sults, and analysis

  Curated!
  
  And in doing so, I feel proud to assume the role of Patron Saint of LessWrong Challenges, and All Those Who Test Their Art Against the Territory.

  Some reasons I’m excited about this post:

  1) Challenges help make LessWrong more grounded, and build better feedback loops for actually testing our rationality. I wrote more about this in my curation notice for The Darwin Game challenge, and wrote about it in the various posts of my own Babble Challenge sequence.

  2) It was competently executed and analysed. There were nice control groups used; the choice of scoring rule was thought through (as well as including what would’ve been the results of other scoring rules); the data was analysed in a bunch of different ways which managed to be both comprehensive while at the same time maintaining my curiosity and being very readable.

  Furthermore, I can imagine versions of this challenge that would either feel butchered, in such a way that I felt like I didn’t learn anything from reading the results, or needlessly long and pedantic, in such a way that getting the insight wouldn’t have been worth the trek for most people. Not so with this one. Excellent job, UnexpectedValues.

  3) I want to celebrate the efforts of the participants, some of whom devised and implemented some wonderful strategies. The turtle graphic fingerprints, gzip checks, mean-deviation scatter, and many others were really neat. Kudos to all who joined, and especially the winners, Jenny, Reed, Eric, Scy, William, Ben, Simon, Adam and Viktor!

  I would love to see more activities like these on LessWrong. If you want to run one and would like help with marketing, funding for prizes, or just general feedback—do send me a message!

• jacobjacob 28 Jan 2021 7:28 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Ap­proval Ex­trac­tion Ad­ver­tised as Production

  Nice, this is interesting!

  You need your business partners but they don’t need you

  I don’t understand what this means and what it’s measuring.

• jacobjacob 26 Jan 2021 2:54 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Nora_Ammann’s comment on: On the na­ture of pur­pose

  Makes sense! An intro paragraph could be good :)