methree

• methree 23 Jan 2020 6:58 UTC

  1 point

  on: Disasters

  Just curious, how much would you be willing to pay for a mail-based, yearly subscription to a service that takes care of the more onerous things you mentioned: planning, logistics, rotation; one that ensures you always have a one-week supply of essentials available (something to eat, medical, charger, etc) and manages their disposal (reuse and recycle) and refreshing on a regular basis?

  I’m sure it’s not necessary to have entire populations be prepared as long as enough individuals can help the rest (like the example of a neighbor with a pool), so I’m wondering how low the barrier for preparation needs to be to reach that amount of people, in monetary terms.

• methree 22 May 2021 5:51 UTC

  4 points

  on: The Web is Turn­ing into Cable TV

  I agree with the majority of what you speculate about concerning the effects of an ad-oriented internet, although I keep seeing very good science and engineering content produced exclusively for the web and paid for through a mix of advertising and some form of sales (merchandise, the right to access early content, etc.).

  The Mozilla Foundation publishes excellent articles on privacy on the web in their newsletter and then actually takes action, as does the Electronic Frontier Foundation; those would be good groups to contribute to if you want to support action against advertisers.

  Finally, since I dislike ads but work in the advertising industry, I’ve thought of ways to reconcile the right to earn capital in a capitalist system, which is supported by advertising because it sways people’s purchasing patterns, with the right to freedom of choice which many of us feel we inherently possess and which is threatened by advertising, which sways our purchasing patterns (especially painful is the fact that “successful” advertising often exploits behavioural biases and causes targets to make suboptimal choices, like spending more money than they can afford to).

  For the last few years, I’ve entertained the idea of turning the tables completely by having machine agents seek out ads on behalf the consumer. Inspiration comes from human behaviour: if someone close to you knows you need new shoes, and they know your preferences, and they know your budget constraints, they can make pretty good recommendations—parents even go ahead and buy things without further discussion, often hunting for discounts and making a lot of comparisons, shielding the child from the negative effects of advertising. An agent would do the same thing for the consumer: knowing their needs, preferences, and spending practices, it would actively keep an eye on relevant ads and only surface information about those it considers relevant. This may require more generalized artificial intelligence than currently exists, though.

• methree 20 Jun 2021 7:22 UTC

  2 points

  on: 10 Deadly Viruses And Bac­te­ria Created In Labs − 6 SARS 2.0

  A physics professor at the university of Hamburg, in Germany, spent over a year putting together research papers and publications from labs dedicated to that kind of research, like the one in Wuhan, and published significant bits of them along with commentary to instigate public discussion about Covid and the need—or lack thereof—of research related to making viruses more dangerous. He asks a great point: even in the best case, the research done so far on Coronaviruses from bats, manipulated to be more dangerous in a lab, has not helped us prevent a pandemic, so why continue to risk a breach?

  This is a very condensed summary in English: https://​​www.uni-hamburg.de/​​en/​​newsroom/​​presse/​​2021/​​pm8.html . It links to the complete document in German and English; even if you don’t understand German, all the snippets of published articles are in English, so you can follow along even without the commentary.

• methree 20 Jun 2021 7:28 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: methree’s comment on: 10 Deadly Viruses And Bac­te­ria Created In Labs − 6 SARS 2.0

  He provides circumstantial evidence that this pandemic was the result of the research. His purpose, however, doesn’t seem to be the assignment of blame on political grounds but making sure that a very possible origin of the virus is not dismissed as a conspiracy theory, rendering prevention measures suboptimal in the future.

A de­ci­sion tree for vac­ci­nat­ing chil­dren against Covid-19, or how to wisely make a mon­u­men­tal decision

• methree 21 Jan 2022 12:48 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: mike’s comment on: A de­ci­sion tree for vac­ci­nat­ing chil­dren against Covid-19, or how to wisely make a mon­u­men­tal decision

  It’s hard, and I find that I need to update my models every now and then. Practice makes better.

• methree 21 Jan 2022 12:50 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: cistrane’s comment on: A de­ci­sion tree for vac­ci­nat­ing chil­dren against Covid-19, or how to wisely make a mon­u­men­tal decision

  I read studies (seriously, it’s super time-consuming!) and consider the best evidence available. Because of the lag introduced by studies, sometimes hearsay is enough to put in a guesstimate. It’s interesting to play around with the values, however, and see what magnitude change in a single one would lead to a change in the ultimate decision. Sometimes you find out it doesn’t make a difference, and more precise information would be irrelevant, so you can move on.

• methree 21 Jan 2022 12:52 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: dotExe’s comment on: A de­ci­sion tree for vac­ci­nat­ing chil­dren against Covid-19, or how to wisely make a mon­u­men­tal decision

  It is great for holding discussions when there are more people involved in a decision.

  As for the calculation, can you help me spot the mistake? I can’t find it!

  $(0.000004\ast 619.994)+(0.999996\ast 600)=.002479976+599.976=599.98$

• methree 22 Jan 2022 8:36 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Thomas Sepulchre’s comment on: A de­ci­sion tree for vac­ci­nat­ing chil­dren against Covid-19, or how to wisely make a mon­u­men­tal decision

  Thanks! I’ve updated the calculation and diagram.

• methree 5 Feb 2022 20:58 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Alex Mikhalev’s comment on: A de­ci­sion tree for vac­ci­nat­ing chil­dren against Covid-19, or how to wisely make a mon­u­men­tal decision

  The whole point of using a model is to explain and predict without the sometimes prohibitive costs of not modelling, but it comes at the price of losing “resolution of reality”. That loss is what leads to uncertainty. Understanding enough about the immune system to know how current vaccines operate in the body and how risks add up differently in different bodies (ecosystems, really) could take several generations of dedicated research… we’ve collectively been at it since before Pasteur, keep making amazing discoveries, and still can’t provide really good answers. So I feel you will only get half-baked guesses in this forum and slightly better ones if you ask COVID experts.

• methree 12 Feb 2022 7:21 UTC

  2 points

  on: No, hu­man life was not a mis­ery un­til the 1950s

  Just a note that this has a very anthropocentric perspective about utility. Humans do not live in isolation, however, and our numbers and behaviours affect the rest of the “system” (essentially, all other macroscopic life forms and plenty of microscopic ones). Taking a step back, human happiness may not be a good indicator, at all, of total utility to the system. There is probably a number of humans that just about maximises total utility and going beyond it only hurts the whole.

• methree 12 Feb 2022 7:50 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Alex Mikhalev’s comment on: A de­ci­sion tree for vac­ci­nat­ing chil­dren against Covid-19, or how to wisely make a mon­u­men­tal decision

  I finally got around to fixing the diagrams. It wasn’t an iPad-specific problem, just the way diagrams are “pasted” into the editor when copied directly from PlantUML… apparently, it’s not the image that gets pasted, but the URL to a diagram rendered server-side which has a limited lifetime.

• methree 12 Feb 2022 9:21 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: cistrane’s comment on: Why do peo­ple avoid vac­ci­na­tion?

  It is being done, search for inactivated vaccines in https://​​www.raps.org/​​news-and-articles/​​news-articles/​​2020/​​3/​​covid-19-vaccine-tracker . I seem to recall there’s a tiny, tiny, tiny chance of some viruses not being inactive, so I don’t see an advantage. Also, all the adverse reactions of an mRNA vaccine seem to be related to the configuration of the spike protein they produce because it is very similar to the virus’ spike protein, and an inactivated virus vaccine has the actual spike protein, so no gain there either. It is an alternative, though.

  Also, there’s no “free lunch” in this pandemic: either one accepts the risks associated with infection without a vaccine, or the risks associated with a vaccine, or sacrifices contact with fellow humans. In that calculation, the more information one has, the better off one is. It would be nice to see more funding in personalized recommendations (i.e. better prior determination of someone’s propensity to permanent or deadly side effects to the virus’and the vaccine), but making health recommendations is very regulated and carries high liability.

• methree 24 Mar 2022 5:43 UTC

  6 points

  on: In the very near fu­ture the in­ter­net will an­swer all of our ques­tions and that makes me sad

  That is a very interesting proposal indeed, a search engine that doesn’t return links to existing pages but instead generates them on the fly based on the query and the knowledge it has, like an aunt who just must have an answer to everything, even if it’s made up, would be a lot more entertaining and possibly even more useful than existing ones. It would no longer be a search engine, but an answering machine, which certainly fits Google’s goal of making knowledge find-able.

  Ok, that’s not what you meant, but I think it has potential.

• methree 7 Apr 2022 20:53 UTC

  10 points

  on: Play­ing with DALL·E 2

  It makes me wonder what 22 bucks in a glass of COVID look like. It also matches pretty well with my experience with dreams, where written words and letters are always fake even though I “know” what they stand for.

  More importantly, what does it produce when you ask it to draw the future (maybe in the style of the 70s)?

  Okay, seriously, this is a great way to explore how “common sense” differs between humans and this AI and highlight the risks, visually and viscerally, of relying on a technology that is fundamentally alien to humanity. Images are innocuous, but what happens when you apply AI to other objectives?

• methree 7 Apr 2022 21:11 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: methree’s comment on: Play­ing with DALL·E 2

  Is it ok if I hang the image of “a blog post on less wrong” on my wall? It speaks to my artistic sensibility.

• methree 10 Apr 2022 21:36 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Dave Orr’s comment on: Play­ing with DALL·E 2

  Hahaha! Of course. Thank you so much for running suggestions. This is what having young children with incredible artistic skills is like.

• methree 11 Apr 2022 13:39 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Dave Orr’s comment on: Play­ing with DALL·E 2

  I have a suspicion the guidelines are violated because “22” is a bullet caliber… a different number would probably work.

• methree 20 Sep 2022 5:50 UTC

  0 points

  −37

  on: Gene drives: why the wait?

  To me, the idea of eliminating an entire species of insect that is part of a complex system sounds reckless. The consequences cannot be predicted and we continue the trend of destroying rather than adapting. Not to mention that DNA is complex in its own right and we cannot predict the consequences of introducing mutations at a faster rate than “nature” has stabilized coping with.

  The objective is not to eliminate malaria, really; it’s to eliminate the disease that is caused by malaria, for which there are many approaches that do not require messing with large ecosystems, such as improving the resistance of victims or keeping mosquitoes at a distance (heck, if we are determined to introduce mutations, why not add one that causes the mosquitoes to dislike a particular smell, for example, and then make towns smell like that? It would be less destructive, although still subject to the unpredictability of messing with DNA).

  (Note that even in the article you share about mosquitoes not being ecologically important there is didn’t among the experts)

• methree 25 Sep 2022 20:11 UTC

  2 points

  1

  in reply to: methree’s comment on: Gene drives: why the wait?

  Fair points made, will take them and ponder.