I’ll pay at least $150 $100 for this, might increase later. And yes, it will go to John if he accepts it.
jacobjacob
Karma: 3,576
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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A lot depends on the details, but the practical upshot for me is that it is helpful to remember that the right thing in one placetime is not always the right thing everywhere or forever.
[...]
However in real life there is substantial variation in cultures and preferences and logistical challenges and coordinating details and so on.
Martin Sustrik’s “Anti-Social Punishment” post is great real-life example of this
Curated.
This model makes explicit something I’ve had intuitions about for a while (though I wasn’t able to crystallise them nearly as perspicaciously or usefully as UnexpectedValues). Beyond the examples given in the post, I’m reminded of Zvi’s discussion of control systems in his covid series, and also am curious about how this model might apply to valuing cryptocurrencies, which I think display some of the same dynamics.
The post is also very well-written. It has the wonderful flavour of a friend explaining something to you by a whiteboard, building up a compelling story almost from first principles with clear diagrams. I find this really triggers my curiosity—I want to go out and survey housemates to pin down the social behavior curves around me; go up to the whiteboard and sketch some new graphs and figure out what they imply, and so forth.
Have you been meaning to buy the LessWrong Books, but not been able to due to financial reasons?
Then I might have a solution for you.
Whenever we do a user interview with someone, they get a book set for free. Now one of our user interviewees asked that instead their set be given to someone who otherwise couldn’t afford it.
So, well, we’ve got one free set up for grabs!
If you’re interested, just send me a private message and briefly describe why getting the book was financially prohibitive to you, and I might be able to send a set your way.
Strange indeed… but, here is a working version:
Instrumental Intelligence Hypothesis: intelligence evolved because it is useful for solving tasks and making plans in nature, and the only reason why humans don't have more of it is because there are metabolic costraints
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)
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.)