PeterMcCluskey

Karma: 1,703

PeterMcCluskey 12 Apr 2021 20:54 UTC
8 points
in reply to: deluks917’s comment on: People Will Listen
How many LWers bought Bitcoin in 2011 and ended up with poor returns due to the demise of Mt. Gox?

I almost ended up losing a little of my money that way, but was stopped when my KYC evidence was rejected for no clear reason. I ended up doing well by buying Ripples a couple of years later, but I don’t know whether I would have done that if I had lost money in my first attempt.

PeterMcCluskey 25 Mar 2021 4:43 UTC
2 points
in reply to: PeterMcCluskey’s comment on: Covid 2/25: Holding Pattern
It’s got to be either reporting delays, or people dying months after they contracted the virus. I’ve changed my mind a bit, and I’m currently guessing it’s more the latter.

I compared the ratio of reported deaths over the past week in California (1273) and New York state (406). This clearly has no connection with people who recently tested positive, since New York has been reporting over twice as many new cases as California recently.

It was only before mid-January that California last reported something in excess of twice the new cases that NY reported, and only around Christmas or earlier that California reported 3 times as many new cases a NY.

So unless there’s something quite misleading about the ratio of California to NY numbers, recent deaths are dominated by people who contracted the virus around Christmas / New Years.

PeterMcCluskey 24 Mar 2021 18:57 UTC
14 points
in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: Thirty-three randomly selected bioethics papers
It looks like the average academic bioethicist is ok (with high variance), and is not having much effect outside academia.

Like lawyers, the bioethicists we hear about the most are the ones defending the least ethical clients.

Are the less conspicuous bioethicists doing the equivalent of mundane, mildly beneficial lawyers who write contracts? Or are they mostly engaged in intellectual masturbation?

I’m unclear on why I’d hire a bioethicist unless I was trying to defend behavior that looks unethical. Which suggests that there isn’t much demand for bioethicists to do constructive things.

PeterMcCluskey 21 Mar 2021 23:33 UTC
3 points
on: What are the best resources to point people who are skeptical of getting vaccinated for COVID-19 to?
I suggest the RaDVaC article, as evidence of what experts think about vaccine safety when they’re focused on protecting themselves.

You might follow that up with this suggestion about why the FDA might mislead us: if people notice that some vaccines are safer than the alternative by really big margins, they’ll start asking why we don’t just bypass FDA review in some cases. That will bias the FDA to suggest that most vaccines are tough choices, which need the FDA’s expertise to evaluate. But given big variations in how harmful diseases are, this will lead the FDA to be too cautious about the worst diseases.

Also, it can’t hurt to mention evidence of asymmetric blame that motivates the FDA to overstate the risks of all medical treatments.

PeterMcCluskey 9 Mar 2021 19:15 UTC
6 points
in reply to: AllAmericanBreakfast’s comment on: Why Hasn’t Effective Altruism Grown Since 2015?

If you act on it by donating, you can be done with it. It’s a conversation-stopper.

In 2014, it felt like donations were a good conversation topic. There were enough new charities to evaluate that it was worthwhile to get other people’s opinions. The EA community and the number of new charities were small enough that we could come close to knowing most of the people involved in starting the charities, and expect most EAs to know something about those new charities.

Then the EA movement became much larger than the Dunbar number, it became harder to keep track of all the charities, and the value of additional funding declined a bit. At least some of those factors made it harder for EA to be a good community.

PeterMcCluskey 3 Mar 2021 5:27 UTC
2 points
on: Covid 2/25: Holding Pattern
The slow decline in deaths seems like it must be primarily due to delayed reporting.

We know that there were a few big batches of delayed reports, plus day of the week effects. I can’t think of a good reason to expect those without also expecting a significant number of small batches.

I expect that hospitalization data is much more reliable evidence about the timing of bad health. It shows the expected sharp drop. It also dropped faster than the death rate after the summer wave, and maybe slightly faster than the death rate after the first wave.

In order believe that the death rate was dropping much more slowly than the reported hospitalization rate, it would seem to require something like deaths per hospitalization rise as hospitals become less overwhelmed, or that there are reporting problems that have a significant effect on the rate of change of hospitalization data. Neither seems likely.

I suppose there might be some predictable demographic changes that alter the death rate (i.e. younger people get infected at earlier stages of each wave), but for recent data it’s hard to reconcile that with the effects of vaccines.

PeterMcCluskey 28 Feb 2021 3:52 UTC
2 points
in reply to: SpectrumDT’s comment on: Book review: The Geography of Thought
When talking at a high level, the author refers to cultures that were heavily influenced by China, versus European cultures. But many specific research results or anecdotes are only available for one Eastern and one Western nation. For those, he mostly refers to the specific nations, and leaves it to the reader to make inferences about how well those apply to similar nations.

PeterMcCluskey 19 Feb 2021 16:27 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Zvi’s comment on: Covid 2/18: Vaccines Still Work
Yes, Scott’s first 25% appears to be only about preventing infection.

PeterMcCluskey 18 Feb 2021 23:28 UTC
2 points
on: Covid 2/18: Vaccines Still Work

These two numbers being identical thus suggests Scott doesn’t see it that way, and in particular that he’s thinking that if it doesn’t work in a hospital (or doesn’t work in a hospital for any given reasonable dosing method) it also doesn’t work as a supplement.

I don’t imagine Scott thinks that. I assume the most important difference is between vitamin D working to prevent infections, versus vitamin D preventing serious harm given infection.

Could the difference between the Spain and Brazil studies be due to bigger vitamin D deficiencies in Spain?

PeterMcCluskey 12 Feb 2021 20:10 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Polytopos’s comment on: Book review: The Geography of Thought
That might have some interesting implications for where mind uploading will initially become popular.

PeterMcCluskey 10 Feb 2021 0:28 UTC
22 points
on: How would free prediction markets have altered the pandemic?
Here are some pairs of contracts that would have been informative last spring:
- Vaccinations in 2020 if human challenge trials are started by June 1.
- Vaccinations in 2020 if human challenge trials are not started by June 1.
- COVID deaths in 2020 if rapid at-home tests are approved by July 1.
- COVID deaths in 2020 if rapid at-home tests are not approved by July 1.
- COVID deaths in 2020 if most states keep schools closed all year.
- COVID deaths in 2020 if most states reopen schools in September.
- Vaccinations in winter 2021 if vaccine manufacturers are paid at least $1000 per dose for the first 10 million doses.
- Vaccinations in winter 2021 if vaccine manufacturers are paid at most $100 per dose for the first 10 million doses.
Some contracts that would have been informative in October:
- COVID deaths in 2021 if state health agencies are put in charge of most vaccinations.
- COVID deaths in 2021 if drug stores are put in charge of most vaccinations.
- COVID deaths in 2021 if hospitals are put in charge of most vaccinations.
It would likely require decades of advocacy by prediction market supporters before mainstream opinion shapers feel constrained to acknowledge that these markets constitute expert opinions. But if they did acknowledge that expertise enough for it to alter government policies, I’d guess that 2 or 3 of those policy changes would have cut COVID deaths by about 10% each.

Book review: The Geography of Thought

PeterMcCluskey9 Feb 2021 18:47 UTC

72 points

37 comments5 min readLW link

(www.bayesianinvestor.com)

PeterMcCluskey 8 Feb 2021 3:26 UTC
12 points
on: Metric selection bias: why Moore’s law is less important than you think
The decline in solar costs is known as Swanson’s Law.

PeterMcCluskey 31 Jan 2021 18:26 UTC
4 points
in reply to: ESRogs’s comment on: ESRogs’s Shortform
I’m unsure why you’d expect anything to be better than pure plays such as shorting bond or Eurodollar futures.

I expect the effects on value minus growth to be rather small.

If you’re betting that rising rates will be due to increased inflation, more than rising real rates, then it’s worth looking at companies that have borrowed at low long-term rates. Maybe shipping companies (dry bulk?), homebuilders, airplane leasing companies?

PeterMcCluskey 26 Jan 2021 4:09 UTC
13 points
on: What’s a good explanation for why you should have a Bayesian approach to scientific evidence?
Maybe ask him when was the right time for doctors to start having an opinion about whether smoking is unhealthy?

PeterMcCluskey 19 Jan 2021 22:12 UTC
2 points
on: Benefits of “micro-tracking” for personal health measurements?
For food, I’ve found macro-tracking to be sustainable for 5+ years, whereas I would not be willing to sustain micro-tracking for more than a few weeks.

PeterMcCluskey 10 Jan 2021 5:59 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Anti-Aging: State of the Art
Baze has technology for cheaper and more convenient blood tests. So far they’re only using it to sell vitamins. I presume regulatory obstacles are delaying more valuable uses.

PeterMcCluskey 10 Jan 2021 5:22 UTC
13 points
on: Where do (did?) stable, cooperative institutions come from?
I’ve put together some guesses about what’s important for US competence as a nation, loosely based on ideas from WEIRDest People and Where is my Flying Car?.

Human societies likely default to small groups that fragment (due to disagreements) if they grow much above 20 people.

Over the past 10 millennia or so, it has become common to use extended ties of kinship to scale up to the Dunbar number, and sometimes well beyond that.

Western civilization scaled up to unprecedented levels of trust and cooperation via a set of fairly new cultural features: moral universalism, use of impartial rules rather than contextual particularism, the expectation of supernatural punishment for undetected crimes, more emphasis on analytical thinking, and more positive-sum thinking.

The US has been partly held together by a shared religion, whose teachings promote trust between co-religionists, and which also encourage treating others as potential converts.

Shared enemies (Nazis, Communism, maybe briefly Islam) created additional, but temporary, boosts to cooperation within the English speaking world. Some of the polarization we’ve recently experienced is just a return to patterns that were previously common. If that were most of what’s going wrong, I’d be fairly optimistic about the future of the US.

Over the past few decades, the US has experienced a decline in religion (or a least in a shared religion).

Science got too aggressive about demanding that we disbelieve any knowledge beyond what scientific journals would publish. That eroded beliefs in supernatural phenomena, and also eroded beliefs in the religion(s) that helped to promote large-scale trust and cooperation.

Science didn’t succeed in replacing religion with something more rigorous. Instead, new quasi-religions sprouted (e.g. Green fundamentalism, and the cult of Trump). They’re optimized more for features such as compatibility with forager instincts, than the ability to promote prosperity.

In contrast, the Protestant religion was selected in part for its ability to foster cooperation between distant strangers.

I’m concerned that many US problems of the past few decades (including The Great Stagnation) can only be solved by something like a return to being a Christian nation. The tension between Science and Christianity seems strong enough that it’s hard to see how that is feasible.

Another problem is that democracy has morphed from a tool, to a goal in itself.

That has undercut the authority of political parties. They used to have near total control over what candidates were on the ballot. Then, starting around 1970, there was a massive shift toward direct voter control over who each party nominated.

That made it harder to hold any institution accountable for political results. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that this trend started around the same time as The Great Stagnation. It seems correlated with reduced trust in authority in general, although I can’t tell whether this is a cause or effect.

WEIRDest People also claims that WEIRD cultures have produced lower testosterone levels, via monogamy. That’s important, since it reduces impulsivity, reduces competitive urges, and increases positive-sum thinking.

But testosterone seems to have decreased over the past few decades, so the US ought to be in a better position than most societies to rebuild institutions.

I’m maybe 90% confident that the US still has enough competence to postpone collapse and civil war for a few decades.

It seems like there should be some research on how companies, nonprofits, etc. scale up past the Dunbar number. But I’m unclear whether it’s relevant to groups as big as the US, but WEIRDest People has led me to expect that the optimal approach for a group of 300 million people will be rather different from the optimal approach for 200,000 people.

PeterMcCluskey 8 Jan 2021 18:09 UTC
11 points
on: Why the outside view suggests that longevity escape velocity is a long time away and cryonics is a much more feasible option for those alive today: signal-boosting a comment by Calm-Meet9916 on Reddit
I agree that Aubrey is too optimistic, but there’s been a bit more progress than you indicate.

Alzheimer’s appears to be curable (although not easily treatable), at least if it’s treated early.

There’s been progress in understanding what lifestyle mistakes are the leading causes of cardiovascular disease. 20-30 years ago most people thought it was mainly saturated fat, now there’s more awareness of diabetes-related factors.

PeterMcCluskey 31 Dec 2020 6:04 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Yoav Ravid’s comment on: Open & Welcome Thread—December 2020
The GreaterWrong.com interface offers a theme with light text on a dark background.

PeterMcCluskey

Book re­view: The Geog­ra­phy of Thought

Book review: The Geography of Thought