(Should I write up a top-level post arguing this rather than leave a comment? Probably eventually).
If it saves you some effort, I feel like my now here’s why I’m punching you points at the same thing?
philh
Karma: 5,789
I might get around to editing the post at some point, but unless/until I do, a note:
Anti-coordination: (two games)
In this game, the goal is to play a different move than your playmate. If then there’s no reason to prefer one move over another, but if they’re not equal there’ll be some maneuvering around who gets which reward. If you’re not happy with the outcome, then changing the move you play will harm your playmate more than it harms you. The Nash equilibria are when you play different moves, and these are socially optimal.
Correction: if you’re not happy with the outcome, changing your move will harm your playmate more than it harms you if , and harm you more than them if .
Also, Battle of the Sexes is an instance of this game if you relabel the moves. If you label them “do the thing you/they prefer”, you get . ( is “we both do my thing”, is “we both do their thing”, is “I do my thing and they do theirs” and is “I do their thing and they do mine”. if going alone to either is equally bad.) If you label them “do the thing they/you prefer”, you get . You won’t get . (That would imply payoffs like: I most want to do “my thing” together. Failing that I want to do “their thing” together. But if we do go separately, I’d rather do “their thing” than “my thing”. Which wouldn’t be a BoS.)
Alyssa Vance ran the same game on her own page, inspired by this one. Someone nuked MIRI because AMF had been nuked in landfish’s game. The nuke on AMF got cancelled after a counternuke was launched. The nuke on MIRI stayed and wasn’t countered. (I can’t see the original game, I don’t know exactly what order things happened in.)
Even assuming simultaneous moves, it’s not battle of the sexes. In my own classification it would be at the intersection between Too Many Cooks and Farmer’s Dilemma: with . (.)
I didn’t mention BoS in that post because it doesn’t fit the schema. But (suddenly obviously) it fits if you just relabel one player’s moves. Then it has or , making it Anti-Coordination in either case.
Fair enough re: flavoring. (I did have a quick look myself earlier, but didn’t find anything. Thanks for being more thorough.)
The literature does engage with the “mannitol, sorbitol, citric acid, glycine, and many others may cause past studies to not find an effect”. At least five of the eight studies referenced in the meta analysis, the meta analysis itself, the other paper, and many other studies make statements to that effect and are designed to avoid it.
To clarify, do they do “we tested a zinc lozenge with some of these things and a zinc lozenge without (and maybe also a placebo)”? That’s the kind of thing I meant by taking it seriously. If we want to compare condition A and condition B, my sense is we can learn a lot less from “study on condition A, study by different group on condition B” than a study comparing them directly.
As for testing yourself—unless you do a blinded, well done, long term, controlled self experiment a la Gwern, it’s so easy to make a mistake that it probably is meaningless.
Eh, honestly I just don’t think this is true in this case. There are ways I could have made mistakes—it’s possible that
The first cold I took them for just got better really fast naturally.
And then I didn’t catch one for a year and a half, despite twice thinking I was coming down with one.
And then when I did get one, it had fast onset and unusually light symptoms. Or I just didn’t remember what it was like to have a cold by then.
Or maybe I got more colds than that and completely forgot about them. I acknowledge that this kind of thing is possible. I don’t think it’s super likely. I definitely don’t think it’s likely enough that I should consider my experience meaningless.
I confess that reading these studies in any depth makes my eyes glaze over. But I did see the first mention of citric acid in the paper (out of two, according to ctrl-F) before writing my comment, and it doesn’t say they avoid the interaction. The mentions are
Several randomised trials have been carried out to test whether zinc lozenges might have treatment effects on the common cold but the findings are mixed. Eight studies have reported significant benefits of zinc lozenges,1–9 whereas 12 studies did not find benefit;9–15 one report published six9 and another two separate trials,10 and one study was published in two separate reports.2 3 Zinc ion can tightly bind to a number of substances, such as citric acid, potentially preventing the release of free zinc ions from lozenges in the oropharyngeal region. Therefore, the formulation of a zinc lozenge is crucial in determining whether a particular lozenge is efficacious. Shortcomings in the formulations and low doses could explain most of the negative findings.16–19
Eby commented that the majority of zinc lozenges on the US market in 2008 were expected to be ineffective against colds.16 Most of the zinc lozenges he surveyed contained citric acid, which binds zinc ions, and many lozenges had such low doses of zinc that they were unlikely to have any pharmacological effects. Thus, although there is evidence from several trials that properly composed zinc lozenges may shorten the duration of colds,1–9 a patient with ordinary common cold cannot easily materialise the benefit by zinc lozenges available from a drugstore, a problem further supported by our findings on the 5-day zinc acetate treatment.
Neither of these says that they used a lozenge without citric acid. I assumed that citric acid was part of the orange flavoring.
Now, this study does use mannitol. And mannitol is one of the things mentioned by some studies as blocking zinc’s action.
(Not important, but I assume you mean “sorbitol” here.)
That said, it’s not clear at all. Maybe a particular combination of excipients did randomly manage to make some trials fail and others succeed! But that’s what you’d expect to happen in a case of no effect but publication bias and excuses. Which seems more likely?
Yeah, it’s a big confusing mess. Given the state of the literature, if I tried the lozenges and they didn’t work, I wouldn’t be too surprised. Nor would I be shocked if I tried some lozenges with citric acid and they did work. But
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The literature doesn’t seem to seriously engage with the podcast’s “here are a bunch of ways you can fuck up a zinc lozenge, but don’t do any of these and it’ll be fine” hypothesis? Maybe I just haven’t looked closely, but the studies generally seem to be comparing one brand of lozenge against placebo, not one brand against another. The meta-analyses seem to group studies by salt or dose, not by “does the podcast’s hypothesis predict this will work”. Which isn’t necessarily unreasonable, but I think it does mean that a big confusing mess isn’t as big a red flag as it might be otherwise.
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This is something anyone can test for themselves fairly cheaply. I’ve tested it for myself, and I’m fairly confident it works for me. (At least the “these lozenges work” part, not the “these other lozenges don’t work” part.) This seems like a reasonable way to proceed, in the face of a big mess of evidence and a cheap way to test for oneself.
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To clarify voting: users have different vote strengths based on karma, and the ability to give a “strong” or “weak” vote. My own weak vote is worth two points, and my strong vote is worth 8. If you hover over a comment’s score, you can see how many people voted on it. (More info.)
I have two comments currently at +10, “I note that that study...” and “it will wash off over time...”. Both of them have only two votes, my own +2 vote and someone else’s +8. I’m curious myself why someone (or possibly two different people) thought these comments were worth a strong upvote. But they both have only one person voting for them other than my own default vote.
(For myself, I’ve upvoted the article, and philip_b’s “I have common cold...”, and have my own default votes. I initially downvoted your “I don’t think it is worth...” but retracted that vote after you edited. I’ve made no other votes in this thread currently.)
Also wouldn’t the constant swallowing and cycling of mucus make any coating wash off?
It will wash off over time, but you take several a day.
I note that that study used lozenges with orange flavoring, which according to the podcast I think we’d expect not to work. (Presumably it contains citric acid, at minimum.)
Why do you think that?
Copying my comment from the original site:
According to a podcast that seemed like the host knew what he was talking about, you also need the lozenges to not contain any additional ingredients that might make them taste nice, like vitamin C. (If it tastes nice, the zinc isn’t binding in the right place. Bad taste doesn’t mean it’s working, but good taste means it’s not.) As of a few years ago, that brand of lozenge was apparently the only one on the market that would work. More info: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/un2fgBad4uqqwm9sH/is-this-info-on-zinc-lozenges-accurate
since I can not sell my water at a higher price, I am not incentivised to destroy water resource.
You can sell more water at the same price. So the incentive is less, but not zero.
To clarify: when you say “a failing of economics”, do you mean something like “there must be bad economic policy going on here”, or something more like “the field of economics is failing to make correct predictions”?
99% Invisible: McMansion Hell
Guest writes the blog McMansion Hell. It sounds like there are several things she dislikes about McMansions:
Sometimes the owners want weird things on the inside, like a cathedral ceiling. Making that stuff work makes the outside look ugly.
People are too far on the “investment” side of “do you build a house as an investment or a place to live in”.
They look too similar to each other, you can tell where you are in the US from the normal houses but not from the McMansions.
Each one is self-inconsistent, it has different styles of windows and different pitches of roof and stuff.
(I feel like there’s some tension in these, like the person putting in a cathedral ceiling is probably doing it because they personally really want a cathedral ceiling and not because they think it improves the investment value. Also I can’t imagine that being so supposedly ugly improves the investment value. Also I feel like if I was building my own house I’d want to optimize for how it looks on the inside, and if guest wants to judge my taste in interiors she can go fuck herself.)
Guest says that whenever someone writes her saying “I didn’t used to care about McMansions but now every time I see one I hate it” she’s happy, because now one more person feels what she feels.
(Reiterate that I didn’t double check, and I listened to this episode a few days ago now. Higher than usual chance I’m misremembering something, which I mention explicitly because this summary is super negative.)
I’m curious about the process of actually using these checklists. Is there ink and paper involved, with someone physically drawing a check in a box? Does one person do the thing and a different person check the box? (Sounds like that’s the case with doctors and nurses at least.) Or is it just, like, “here’s a list, follow the list”? Presumably it differs between use cases and organizations, but are there guidelines for what processes to use when?
I’m imagining failure modes where someone has an internal experience like… “okay, done step 1, and now step 2 is right over here, might as well do that and go back and check them both. Wait, hm, did I do step 1? Pretty sure, yeah.” And then absentmindedness eventually leads to checking step 1 despite not having done it. Presumably much less likely than abesentmindedly forgetting step 1 without a checklist, but I’m wondering how necessary and/or common it is to guard against that kind of thing.
It’s possible that I’m completely missing the point here, but… the idea of
you can’t actually know what others think of you, so why focus on that?
Seems deeply confused to me.
I think that if I admit that I can’t “know” what others think of me, I’d have to say I also can’t “know” whether they’re sentient, or whether they’re likely to have a good time if they come over for dinner, or whether they’re about to inflict physical violence on me. And these are all questions I care about the answer to, in that I might change my plans if I learned the answer; and two of them are questions I’ve focused on at times and endorse having done so. So this doesn’t seem like an argument against focusing on it.
And in a more normal sense, of course I can know what others think of me, on some level. The guy who, frequently when we spoke, we were kind of hostile towards each other; and when he met my partner, he told them I was a bellend? Pretty sure he didn’t like me. The partner who’s slept by my side most nights for five years even though I sometimes snore, looked after me when I’ve been sick, cheered me up when I’ve felt down, and frequently gives me random compliments? Pretty sure they do like me. These are fairly extreme examples, but suffice it to say that I think I’m capable of picking up on smaller quantities of evidence, too.
And of course it matters what someone thinks of me, because it affects questions like “are they likely to invite me to their next party” and “will they say yes if I ask them on a date” and “if I ask them to mediate a dispute with someone else, will they be biased against me” and “are their friends likely to become my friends”.
Obviously it’s possible to focus too much on the question. But the right amount of focus probably isn’t “zero, ever”, and this specific argument for not focusing doesn’t hold.
Caveat that I’m not an economist, but my sense is that’s not a great way to think about externalities.
The problem is, what does it mean to “pay for” something? If I buy a bag of chips, did I pay 50¢ for the taste and feeling of satiation, and also get an increased risk of heart disease? Or did I pay “50¢ plus increased risk of heart disease” for those things?
If people who went to work in a steel mill knew that it had a higher risk of dying than other jobs that were available, maybe they decided that they were being fairly compensated for the risk of death? (Even if they did decide that, that doesn’t mean these changes were bad.)
Wikipedia has it that an externality is “a cost or benefit for a third party who did not agree to it”. (Benefits come from e.g. vaccines, where I might get one for selfish reasons but it happens to protect those around me.) In this case, there might be a question about whether the steel workers agreed to the cost, but they’re not a third party.
And whether they’re a third party matters, I think, because if we decide there’s an unfair outcome happening, the tools available to us depend a lot on whether the person being harmed gets a say in the matter. Things like nutritional info, energy ratings, “smoking causes lung cancer” warnings, are ways to help people decide what is or isn’t worth it for them, but they mostly only help the person deciding whether or not to buy something. (“Mostly” because health and energy usage do have their own externalities.) If we want to help someone who doesn’t get a say in the transaction, we apply different tools, like taxes and regulation.
(I guess I’ve changed position from my previous comment, I now just think “no, this isn’t an externality”. Workers resisting safety measures is important, like it feels like the kind of thing that if you apply economic tools to make predictions it’s not at all what you’d expect and it seems like this points at an important limitation of economic tools. But that doesn’t turn this into an externality.)
Sorry, but outside of surface elements (being about time, base ten, the word “second”) I’m not sure what about my proposal you think has been done in decimal time.
There’s nothing particularly special about base ten¹, but I’m also not sure there’s any particular reason to move away from it, much like the second. Base twelve would probably be more convenient for mental arithmetic, but I don’t much expect a shift to occur. If 2^24 seconds would be more logical, I confess I don’t see why—what do you mean by “logical”?
And, like… this is partly about looking to the future, but I can’t just ignore the present. Seconds mean something to people today. A billion seconds means something to people today. 2^24 or 2^30 seconds might mean something to some people, but not as many.
Base 10 is special because every base is base 10. :p
Human circadian rhythms can only be stretched so far.
For now—growth mindset!
But apart from that, a Martian day is only 40 minutes longer than an Earth day. So I expect it would still be fine for current human circadian rhythms, and measuring time in Earth days would be inconvenient for Martians.
What does growth look like if you do divide nominal GDP by inflation? (I might look this up at some point, but I’m more likely to remember if I write this comment.)
Do you know why it’s not done this way? Presumably it has its own weirdnesses, but off the top of my head I’m not sure what they’d be. (Other than “there’s lots of ways you might measure inflation”, but that’s true of nominal GDP too I think, and I’d guess also true of the details of how chaining is implemented.)