Jaan/Holden convo link is broken :(
jacobjacob
Karma: 3,600
Following up: as a result of this thread, radvac will likely get a $100k donation (from a donor who was not considering them before). This does not fill their funding needs however, and they’re looking to raise another $300k this year.
For any interested funders, PM me and I can share detailed call notes.
I’ll pay $425 for this answer, will PM you for payment details.
I’ll pay $50 for this answer, will message you for payment details.
I’ll pay at least $75 for this comment. If nothing else, alerting me to RaDVaC’s funding gap is clearly worth that much. I think it offered some interesting considerations beyond that. E.g. the search term polyethylene glycol seems useful, though I haven’t looked into it much at all and definitely don’t have strong models of that domain.
(I also think the fact that this comment bundled together a lot of different arguments and considerations caused the karma to take a downward hit.)
I’ll pay at least $150
$100for this, might increase later. And yes, it will go to John if he accepts it.
Thanks for signal-boosting, I had missed this. I’ll pay at least $300 for it. (The fact that it already had been written 12 days ago seems like a point in its favour!)
Do you know which, if any, risk-reducing precautions they were following?
I have some good leads, will check in with them tomorrow.
(If I stop working on this/don’t make any progress I’ll post about that here, so as not to make this funding gap erroneously appear filled.)
According to a facebook discussion one person involved with RaDVaC said that RaDVaC is heavily cash constrained.
Sounds like a state of affairs that should not be allowed to persist. Very interested in more details/screenshots if possible without violating any privacy norms—I’ll send you my email in PM.
I’m excited about mechanism design in this space. Like, if you have a prediction market (or forecasting question with a good aggregation algorithm), you can sort of selectively throw out pieces of information, and then reward people based on how much those pieces moved the market. (And yes, there are of course lots of goodhart-y failure modes to iron out to make it work.)
In this case I’m not going to be quite so formal. I don’t have that strong of an initial view, so it might often be more of rewarding “provided a very useful write-up” than “provide a compelling counterargument to a thoroughly considered belief”.
[Question] ($1000 bounty) How effective are marginal vaccine doses against the covid delta variant?
Curated.
I think this post strikes a really cool balance between discussing some foundational questions about the notion of agency and its importance, as well as posing a concrete puzzle that caused some interesting comments.For me, Life is a domain that makes it natural to have reductionist intuitions. Compared to say neural networks, I find there are fewer biological metaphors or higher-level abstractions where you might sneak in mysterious answers that purport to solve the deeper questions. I’ll consider this post next time I want to introduce someone to some core alignment questions on the back of a napkin, in a shape that makes it more accessible to start toying with the problem without immediatley being led astray. (Though this is made somewhat harder by the technicalities mentioned in the post, and Paul’s concerns about whether Life is similar enough to our physics to be super helpful for poking around).
Thanks, fixed!
I like this point.
One important nuance, though, is that some of your intense work can be investing in things that decrease the likelihood of getting stuck in a bad attractor.
That way, you have shot at jumping to high-output equilibria that you can actually sustain.
From personal experience, I needed at least 4 different things to go right at the same time before I could start doing 60-80h weeks that didn’t burn me out:
using a Freewrite
building a custom GTD system in Roam that used the API to tailor it very heavily to my preferences
using the Breaktimer app for mac (I set uncancellable 1-min breaks every 45 min)
having a set time each Sunday for doing life admin tasks
Each of these work to counteract overwhelm and burnout in their own way. For example, the regular Breaktimers (3) prevent me from ending up in spirals of working endless, almost addictive sessions without eating or drinking. Admin Sundays (4) mean I get time for improtant tasks that aren’t work, that can otherwise blow up and become the straw that break a camel’s back (“I’ve worked 70h this week, I’m exhausted, and now I need to deal with the massively schlepy implications of forgetting to pay my taxes?”) Stream-of-consciousness writing on the Freewrite (1) allows me to notice unhappy parts of myself, and neglected needs.
Also, each of them provide a space for doing meta-cognition. Crucially, that means that if one of them fails, the others are likely to catch that and help me take corrective action. For example, during the frequent breaks (3) I might notice I feel scattered because I haven’t been using my Roam GTD system, because it feels too cumbersome. So I’ll use task capture to send that task to my admin Sundays (4), which I’ll use to code up a more frictionless GTD system. The following week, I might notice the breaktimers not working properly. But now I’m able to use the actually nice GTD system to add a task to look into and fix the whatever the breaktimer bug is.
Thus, together, these 4 help create a self-sustaining equilibrium.
Curated. I enjoyed how this post was a little journey of deconfusion from the inside. It went through some of the actual cognitive motions one might make when trying to understand economics. (Or, rather, when trying become less confused about questions like “Why does everyone’s lives today seem so much better than people I read about in history books?” or “How is it that the guy at Papa John’s down the street can spend a few days making pizza, and then go to the store… and return with a little all-in-one pocket camera-computer-telephone-thing more powerful than devices that used to help send astronauts into space!?” And so forth.)
The questions sprinkled throughout, and the exercise at the end, also kept me curious and engaged. It’s the kind of post that doesn’t just hand down an insight, but conveys some of the skill required for generating similar insights.
I have put your text inside spoiler tags, since comments appear in recent discussion. In the linked post you’ll learn how to do it for future discussion. :)
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(I lived in this house) The estimate was largely driven by fear of long covid + a much higher value per hour of time, which also factored in altruistic benefits from housemate’s work that aren’t captured by the market price of their salary.
There were also about 8 of us, and we didn’t assume everyone would get it conditional on infection (household attack rates are much lower than that, and you might have time to react and quarantine). We assumed maybe like 2-3 others.
I totally expect we would have paid $84,600 to prevent a random one of us getting covid—and it would’ve even looked like a pretty cheap deal compared to getting it!
I moved this post to drafts :)
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You could imagine an experimental designs where you train worms to accomplish a particular task (i.e. learn which scent means food. If indeed they use scent. I don’t know.) You then upload both trained and untrained worms. If trained uploads perform better from the get-go than untrained ones, it’s some evidence it’s the same worm. To make it more granular there’s a lot of learning tasks from behavioural neuroscience you could adapt.
You could also do single neuron studies: train the worm on some task, find a neuron that seems to correspond to a particular abstraction. Upload worm; check that the neuron still corresponds to the abstraction.
Or ablation studies: you selectively impair certain neurons in the live trained worm, uploaded worm, and control worms, in a way that causes the same behaviour change only in the target individual.
Or you can get causal evidence via optogenetics.