jmh

• jmh 29 Nov 2021 20:07 UTC

  34 points

  on: Omicron Var­i­ant Post #2

  Regarding the Fauci’s statement, I was just reading an article on the NIH site on the history of quarantines which included this observation:

  “Decisions made by health authorities often seemed focused more on reassuring the public about efforts being made to stop transmission of the virus rather than on actually stopping transmission of the virus .” (https://​​www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/​​pmc/​​articles/​​PMC3559034/​​) This was made in the context of the 1918-1919 flu epidemic and Italy.

  In some ways it is a bit of a disappointing read in that we don’t seem to have really learned anything for centuries in some ways.

Mak­ing Sense of Coron­avirus Stats

[Question] To mask or not mask

[Question] Did ev­ery­one miss the big thing about your phone?

[Question] For those who ad­vo­cate Anki

• jmh 26 Sep 2019 12:18 UTC

  19 points

  on: Honor­ing Petrov Day on LessWrong, in 2019

  I was not aware of this story and happy to hear it. While I think having the day of celebration and rememberance should be done, I wonder about the exercise with the button.

  First, just not pushing the button and bring the page down for a day seems not to fit the problem. The button should be shutting down someone else’s site with the realization that they will have some knowledge of that coming and have a button that shuts your page down. Perhaps next year the game could include other sites, and particularly sites whose members do not really see eye-to-eye on things.

  Second, it doesn’t really tell others much about avoiding such situations. Reading Eliezer’s post the critical insight for me seems to be that of remaining calm and taking the time available to think a bit rather than merely react and follow instructions of a mindless process. That Petrov realized that launching 5 missiles just made no sense, so came to the conclusion that there was a system error/​false positive is critical here.

[Question] Are the bad epistemic con­di­tions global?

[Question] Should the US House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives adopt rank choice vot­ing for lead­er­ship po­si­tions?

• jmh 7 Mar 2020 2:52 UTC

  15 points

  on: Cred­i­bil­ity of the CDC on SARS-CoV-2

  The relevant row is the 99th percentile row, which estimates the longest incubation period per 100 people. If you quarantined 100 people, one of them would have an incubation period at least that long.

  This doesn’t seem correct to me but not a statistician and not quite sure what we’re doing the percentiles.

  However, the confidence interval should be a statement about the likelihood the true mean will be found within the range stated (so a 5% chance we got it really wrong). Based on that I don’t follow the claim that at least one of the 100 people should have an incubation period at least as long as that (I assume “that” is the mean value estimated).

• jmh 27 Sep 2019 13:14 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: quanticle’s comment on: Honor­ing Petrov Day on LessWrong, in 2019

  I’m not entirely sure we can ever have a correct choice in foresight.

  With regard to Petrov, he did seem to make a good, and reasoned call: The US launching a first strike with 5 missiles just does not make much sense without some very serious assumptions that don’t seem to be merited.

  I do like the observation that Petrov was being just as unilateralist as what is feared in this thread.

  Do we want to lionize such behavior? Perhaps. You argument seems to lend itself to the lens of an AI problem—and Petrov’s behavior then a control on that AI.

[Question] Who is li­able for AI?

[Question] Will/​Has the Rus­sia-Ukraine war been a tip­ping point for the shift from oil en­ergy?

[Question] What is go­ing on in Sin­ga­pore and the Philip­pines?

• jmh 28 Sep 2021 21:58 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Insub’s comment on: EA Han­gout Pri­son­ers’ Dilemma

  And I’m not entirely sure you should call it a defect. Perhaps more a cooperation outcome with a potential side payment. With the single defect and a $100 side payment by the remaining group to the nuked group you’ve accomplished a Pareto move to a superior outcome. Both organizations are at least as well off as if none were nuked. And if the nuked group just thinks the other is doing just as good work without the side payment they might think it’s a wash who actually gets the additional $100.

  What I would be really interested in is just how this outcome actually attained. Seems like everyone was pretty smart (and altruistic) to realize retaliation was not the right response. In short, was this a case of a Petrovian restraint in responding to the reported nuke attack in a sense.

• jmh 30 Jul 2021 2:18 UTC

  13 points

  on: Brief thoughts on in­effi­cient writ­ing systems

  You might enjoy the story of how the Korean written language, Hangul, came about. It was developed by one of the Kings because he thought the average Korean should have a language they could read and write and leaning Chinese characters was difficult for many—probably for no other reason that most didn’t have the luxury of time that the nobles and scholars had.

  These is an historical movie about the event—I suspect it’s romanticized but the main lines are probably pretty accurate. Called The King’s Letters.

[Question] Is there a bet­ter way to define groups for COVID-19 im­pact?

• jmh 2 Feb 2020 14:52 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: Sniffnoy’s comment on: What Money Can­not Buy

  The real experts will likely spend a bunch of time correct popular misconceptions, which the fakers may subscribe to. By contrast, the fakers will generally not bother “correcting” the truth to their fakery, because why would they? They’re trying to sell to unreflective people who just believe the obvious-seeming thing; someone who actually bothered to read corrections to misconceptions at any point is likely too savvy to be their target audience.

  This seems to rely on the fakes knowing they are fakes. I agree that is a problem and your heuristic useful but I think we (non-experts) are still stuck with the problem of separating out the real experts from those that mistakenly think they are also real experts. Those will likely attempt to correct the true security approach according to their mistaken premises and solutions. We’re still stuck with the problem that money doesn’t get the non-expert client too far.

  Now, you’ve clearly been able to reduce the ratio of real solution to snake oil so moved the probabilities in your favor when throwing money at the problems but not sure just how far.

• jmh 22 Jun 2023 22:54 UTC

  11 points

  2

  on: Les­sons On How To Get Things Right On The First Try

  Good workshop illustration of a general technique. Thanks for posting.

  My take away is that getting things right the first time comes down to knowing where complexity can be eliminated (making analysis simpler) and understanding what needs to be measured coming out of the black box one loads all the complexity in.

  However, I do think that magic comes in with regard to knowing how to take the whole messy problem and turn it into that simple projectile type setting to solve. But I suspect we all have a bit of Alexander in us.

• jmh 10 Dec 2020 5:36 UTC

  11 points

  on: Parable of the Dammed

  Seems very consistent with views of rent-seeking as a negative-sum game.

  Seems inconsistent with the Coase Theorem, and perhaps why, at least moderately impartial, third parties are better suited to mediating disputes than those directly involved. But when talking about politics and government where to find such an impartial 3rd party?

• jmh 16 May 2020 3:16 UTC

  11 points

  on: The EMH Aten’t Dead

  I enjoyed both the perspective and the tone of the post. Up voted.

  Two, probably not to deep thoughts.

  First, years ago I had a discussion with some day traders and one was talking about the SPY EFT He mentioned that the fund owners actually did not invest in all 500 equities but only in the top performing ones (no idea what the criteria was on that). The argument was largely they could not make money running the fund if the invested in both the winning and losing stocks.

  Second, and it relates to the first, one of the other things (different time) that was pointed out was “market” is a problematic terms. Each asset that is traded has a market and that is not the same as “the market”. I think this tends to be something of a problem area for people when the issue of EMH is in question. Many (most) do okay in thinking about a market in APPL (supply and demand, buyers/​sellers, bids and offers) we all get that. But “the market” is a much more complicated (even chaotic) animal. At a high level most also get general portfolio theory but probably could not put a customized plan in place for their personal portfolio. What I suspect happens here, with regard to EMH, is a bit like the fallacy of composition error you get in logic. It’s not clear to me exactly how easy it really is to sum up the many demand and supply functions for each individual asset and then suggest any aggregate price or return to “the market”.

  EMH (or at least most of the discussion here and everywhere else I’ve seen) doesn’t seem to make any distinction between the asset’s market and the general market (much less the global market).