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This is really neat. Thanks for helping me build a technical base (eyyyy) for understanding my partner’s work.
One thing that wasn’t clear to me is: if you can only sequence 150 bases at a time, how do you build a complete picture of a genome? One might come away from your post thinking that next gen sequencing is only useful for getting the edges of the genome, say for simple identification purposes. Based on “chopped up your fragments” and my preexisting knowledge, I expect you do some sort of chopping and then reassembly, but I’d be curious to learn more.
Another thing I’d be excited about reading in a follow-up is even the basics of the technical hurdles of sequencing so much stuff in wastewater and how the NAO intends to overcome it, explained in jefftk-style.
NB: the title no longer appears in bold in the first sentence, contra the style guide.
Bunch of broken images in this one
Sam’s talking about the rich text editor.
There is, by coincidence, a recent PR to fix this.
Is there a way to hide the curated sequences from the frontpage?
I disagree here. Every time I’ve seen someone strong-self-vote their comment, I’ve felt it was pretty bad. It’s rare, and not obviously worth the effort to fix, but I wouldn’t agree with Ray’s take.
I would also expect less exposure in a normal office meeting than at a dance
How do I square that with:
so I would say our ventilation was successful at keeping us from going above standard indoor exposure despite the number of people and active movement
I think “faces being further apart” is basically what I mean in the final two sentences.
It’s much harder to change a tag ontology once created.
I think this is really cool. I nevertheless expect perhaps that I would be that a normal office meeting would result in less exposure than this dance. I’m not actually sure where my intuition is coming from, but I’m going to say it’s due in part to the increased exertion of the dancers causing more potential virus to get mixed into the air, and that this effect is bigger than the increase in CO2 from exertion, if you follow me. The other part would be that perhaps the measurement is too far away from the center of the dance? Hypothetically, if I imagine finding out that the CO2 levels stayed below 1000ppm even in the middle of the dancers, I’d be less skeptical.
Tag suggestion: “Air Quality”. There’s a bunch of things in a cluster of space around here, you could imagine one or more tags. Carbon dioxide, air particulate pollution, and aerosolized respiratory pathogens. The last one may seem a bit of an odd duck, but the techniques for dealing with it are often the same as the others.
I wear a P100 sometimes, and it’s incredibly hard for other people to hear what I’m saying when I’m behind one, which would be a factor.
I get an access error for boston-effective-altruists.
I agree with Mingyuan that Google hasn’t put a lot of work into making the UI a good user experience in a long time, but agree generally that email lists are probably a good option. I do think organizers should still post on Facebook though?
Economic efficiency and a 5 year old bet
5 years ago, my then-boss and I realized we disagreed about something. He thought the oil and gas sector was clearly on the decline, and would be a bad place to put your money. I was a big fan of the efficient market hypothesis, and though, well, shouldn’t that already be priced in?
He was confident and willing to give me good odds, but wanted to be clear he was talking over the very long term. So we agreed: 5 years term, 70% odds. If the O&G sector trailed the S&P 500 by more than 25%, I’d pay him ¢30, if it did better than that, he’d pay me ¢70. (The money being trivial, but the staking of our clear and unambiguous predictions being the important part.)
Now the bet has come to fruition. Take a moment to guess the result if you don’t know.
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It wasn’t even close. The S&P returned 111% over the last 5 years, or 14.25% per year. The Dow Jones US Oil & Gas Index[1] returned −26%, or −5.5% per year.
Would I take the bet today? One thing I appreciate now that I don’t think I understood when I was 24 is that I was betting over a relatively small inefficiency. 5% per year is not an insight that you can get rich on. So the market is not gonna be that efficient. With that insight in mind I probably would have been more humble in my discussion with my boss, and we probably would not have ended up betting. I probably also would have bothered looking at the past 5 years of performance, which I don’t remember doing.
However, I miiight still take the bet again? It was pretty good odds, and it’s famously very hard to predict the stock market, even over the long term like this.
So there you go, not obvious how much I learned from it, but I liked the experience of looking back on the confident feeling of my past self and seeing how I’d changed.
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Readers passably familiar with finance will know that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is famously awful, being weighted by the price of individual shares in the companies, which is an arbitrary number. The Dow O&G index is weighted by market cap instead, like the S&P 500.
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I also wonder — the effect size of forbidding base-stealing would be small, <1%. Maybe the cost to player morale of forbidding an interesting part of the game is worse than the benefit. It’s unclear and I wouldn’t bet on it. But I think it does fit in with the view I have, that he’s arguing against, which is that it’s really hard to show that any individual agent is acting irrationally.
Very intuitive, but perhaps I’m unusual in how much I think about pareto frontiers. (I mean, obviously I‘m unusual in that, but the question is how much I’m unusual relative to your target audience.)
[Question] Should I treat pain differently if it’s “all in my head?”
Probably. I wasn’t in a place to watch the intro video. Just that the written material wasn’t enough to go on to sell me.
(This was meant to be feedback, not a request, which was probably ambiguous.)
I really buy the argument Sinclair makes about reducing trivial inconveniences here. Let’s make a model.
Ambiguity has two main negative effects, according to me:
Reducing precision in the prediction, because some of the prediction is based around interpretation of the creator’s foibles rather than a “true” resolution of a better-specified question.
Making the forecaster’s lives worse, because they want to be forecasting world events, not guessing as to the creators behavior in unclear situations.
Let’s set 1. aside for now. 2. seems like a big deal for sure. But also big is the drag on creating prediction markets imposed by Metaculus-style process. The way to balance these two seems to me to be a question that hinges on what you want your impact to be. If you’re trying to make the world as good a place as possible, you might have quite a strong preference for there being plenty of markets that can be made with low overhead. If the experience for forecasters is bad enough, then you won’t get predictions on those questions, but my empirical belief is that Manifold is striking a better balance right now than Metaculus.
As for 1., again, we can answer it according to, what’s most useful for our goals, and again, I want to claim Manifold is doing well here.
tl;dr There are real tradeoffs here.
I like the post btw!