philh

Karma: 7,793

philh 16 Dec 2024 23:30 UTC
30 points
26
on: [Link] A community alert about Ziz
I think it’s good that this post was written, shared to LessWrong, and got a bunch of karma. And (though I haven’t fully re-read it) it seems like the author was careful to distinguish observation from inference and to include details in defense of Ziz when relevant. I appreciate that.
I don’t think it’s a good fit for the 2023 review. Unless Ziz gets back in the news, there’s not much reason for someone in 2025 or later to be reading this.
If I was going to recommend it, I think the reason would be some combination of
- This is a good example of investigative journalism, and valuable to read as such.
- It’s a good case study of a certain type of person that it’s important to remember exists.
But I don’t think it stands out as a case study (it’s not trying to answer questions like “how did this person become Ziz”), and I weakly guess it doesn’t stand out as investigative journalism either. E.g. when I’m thinking on these axes, TracingWoodgrains on David Gerard feels like the kind of thing I’d recommend above this.
Which, to be clear, not a slight on this post! I think it does what it wanted to do very well, and what it wants to do is valuable, it’s just not a kind of thing that I think the 2023 review is looking to reward.

philh 11 Dec 2024 13:21 UTC
4 points
0
on: Ruining an expected-log-money maximizer
Self review: I really like this post. Combined with the previous one (from 2022), it feels to me like “lots of people are confused about Kelly betting and linear/log utility of money, and this deconfuses the issue using arguments I hadn’t seen before (and still haven’t seen elsewhere)”. It feels like small-but-real intellectual progress. It still feels right to me, and I still point people at this when I want to explain how I think about Kelly.
That’s my inside view. I don’t know how to square that with the relative lack of attention the post got, and it feels weird to be writing it given that fact, but oh well. There are various stories I could tell: maybe people were less confused than I thought; maybe my explanation is unclear; maybe I’m still wrong on the object level; maybe people just don’t care very much; maybe it just happened not to get seen.
If I were writing this today, my guess is:
- It’s worth combining the two posts into one.
- The rank optimization stuff is fine to cut, given that I tentatively propose it in one post and then in the next say “probably not very useful”. Maybe have a separate post for exploring it. No need to go into depth on “extending Kelly outside its original domain”.
- The charity stuff might also be fine to cut. At any rate it’s not a focus.
- Someone sent me an example function satisfying the “I’m pretty sure yes” criteria, so that can be included.
- Not sure if this belongs in the same place, but I’d still like to explore more the “what if your utility function is such that maximizing expected utility at time $t_{1}$ doesn’t maximize expected utility at time $t_{2}$ ?” thing. (I thought I wrote this in the post somewhere, but can’t see it: the way I’d explore this is from the perspective of “a utility function is isomorphic to a description of betting preferences that satisfy certain constraints, so when we talk about a utility function like that, what betting preferences are we talking about?” Feels like the kind of thing someone’s likely already explored, but I haven’t seen it if so.)

philh 2 Dec 2024 13:49 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: (The) Lightcone is nothing without its people: LW + Lighthaven’s big fundraiser
(At least in the UK, numbers starting 077009 are never assigned. So I’ve memorized a fake phone number that looks real, that I sometimes give out with no risk of accidentally giving a real phone number.)

philh 2 Dec 2024 11:01 UTC
11 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: (The) Lightcone is nothing without its people: LW + Lighthaven’s big fundraiser
Okay. Make it £5k from me (currently ~$6350), that seems like it’ll make it more likely to happen.

philh 1 Dec 2024 9:07 UTC
9 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: (The) Lightcone is nothing without its people: LW + Lighthaven’s big fundraiser
If you can get it set up before March, I’ll donate at least £2000.

(Though, um. I should say that at least one time I’ve been told “the way to donate with gift said is to set up an account with X, tell them to send the money to Y, and Y will pass it on to us”, and the first step in the chain there had very high transaction fees and I think might have involved sending an email… historical precedent suggests that if that’s the process for me to donate to lightcone, it might not happen.)

Do you know what rough volume you’d need to make it worthwhile?

philh 24 Nov 2024 15:17 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Yanling Guo’s comment on: Economics101 predicted the failure of special card payments for refugees, 3 months later whole of Germany wants to adopt it
I don’t know anything about the card. I haven’t re-read the post, but I think the point I was making was “you haven’t successfully argued that this is good cost-benefit”, not “I claim that this is bad cost-benefit”. Another possibility is that I was just pointing out that the specific quoted paragraph had an implied bad argument, but I didn’t think it said much about the post overall.

philh 20 Nov 2024 22:12 UTC
4 points
0
on: Book review: the Iliad
My guess: [signalling] is why some people read the Iliad, but it’s not the main thing that makes it a classic.
Incidentally, there was one reddit comment that pushed me slightly in the direction of “yep, it’s just signalling”.
This was obviously not the intended point of that comment. But (ignoring how they misunderstood my own writing), the user
- Quotes multiple high status people talking about the Iliad;
- Tantalizingly hints that they are widely-read enough to be able to talk in detail about the Iliad and the old testament, and compare translations;
- Says approximately nothing about the Iliad;
- And says nothing at all about why they think the Iliad is good, and nor do roughly ³⁄₄ of the people they quote. (Frye explains why it’s important, but that’s different. The last 6 lines of Keats talk about how Keats reacted to it, but that doesn’t say what’s good about it. Borges says a particular line is more beautiful than some other line (I think both lines are fine). Only Santayana tells me what he thinks is good about the Iliad.)
So like, you’re trying to convince me the Iliad isn’t just signalling by quoting Keats, saying essentially “I’d heard the Iliad was so good, but it took me forever to track down a copy^[1]. When I did? Blew my mind, man. Blew my mind.” Nonspecific praise feels like signalling, appeal to authority feels like signalling, and the authority giving nospecific praise? This just really solidly rings my signalling bells, you know?
1. ^
  I misunderstood Keats when I first replied to the comment. I’d assumed that when he said he “heard Chapman speak out loud and bold”, he had, you know, heard someone named Chapman speak, perhaps loudly and boldly. Apparently it was what is called a “metaphor”, and he had actually just read Chapman’s translation.

philh 9 Nov 2024 13:05 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: philh’s comment on: philh’s Shortform
Complex Systems (31 Oct 2024): From molecule to medicine, with Ross Rheingans-Yoo

When you first do human studies with a new drug, there’s something like a ²⁄₃ chance it’ll make it to the second round of studies. Then something like half of those make it to the next round; and there’s a point where you talk to the FDA and say “we’re planning to do this study” and they say “cool, if you do that and get these results you’ll probably be approved” and then in that case there’s like an 85% chance you’ll be approved; and I guess at least one other filter I’m forgetting. Overall something like 10-15% of drugs that start on this pipeline get approved, typically taking at least 7 years.

A drug that gets approved needs to make about $2 billion, to make up for the costs of all those trials plus the trials for the drugs that didn’t get approved. And it has about 10 years to do that before patent protections expire, because you filed the patent before doing the first human studies and you only get 20 years from that point.

Typically what happens is someone forms a company for a specific drug, and while it’s in fairly early trials the company gets bought by a big pharma company. The trials themselves are done by companies that specialize in running clinical trials.

Ross says Thalidomide was sort of the middle of a story. The story started with Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which he wrote as a “look at the horrible conditions meat packers have to endure” but what the public took from it is “excuse me, there are human fingers in my sausages?” So after that was the pure food and drug act which said that anything had to be just the thing it said it was.

But then a drug came which was exactly what it said it was, and that thing was bad for people. So after that you needed to do studies to show safety, but they were less rigorous than they are now?

And then thalidomide happened, which was fine for most people but caused birth defects when taken by a pregnant person. When it came up for approval, the beurocrat looking at it happened to have previously looked at rabbits and seen that drug uptake and metabolization could be different in pregnant rabbits, making something otherwise non-toxic become toxic. And so she said the company needed data about safety in pregnant people, even though this was a non-standard requirement at the time. The company tried to avoid that, she insisted, and it never got approved in the US. But standards still got stricter.

(It did get approved in Europe. It’s relevant that Germany didn’t like tracking birth defects due to previous history, so the problems weren’t noticed as early as they might have been.)

One of the times when regulations got stricter, part of the story is that at the same time as public outrage, there also happened to be a bill in progress for reasons of punishing pharma for something something, so that’s the bill that got through.

At some point you started to get patient advocacy groups, saying “we are dying while you hold this drug up”, and the FDA would pay attention to that. And then the pharma companies would get involved in those groups, and now it’s at the point where you kinda need one of those or the FDA will be like “why would we prioritize you?”

There are drugs that the FDA wants to encourage but which aren’t profitable, e.g. helping with diseases common in the third world and rare in the US. One motivation is if you make one they’ll give you a priority review voucher, good to help another drug of yours get approved faster. These vouchers are transferrable, and the market price is… I think $100k or $200k?

With covid vaccines, the government said “if you produce a thing that satisfies these criteria, we will buy X amount of it for sure”. That took some uncertainty out of the process and helped things get made.

Sometimes a drug will succeed in trials but not get pushed forward for various reasons, sometimes just falling through cracks. One drug this happened with was a covid treatment, which seemed to reduce hospitalizations by 70% in vaccinated people. When it was in development the FDA said it was unlikely to get emergency use authorization, and the company dropped it.

(Related: VaccinateCA got a lot of funding for a while, and then after the funders themselves got vaccinated, it got less funding.)

Later the company was going bankrupt, and they sold off their assets, which included “drugs that seemed promising but we never went anywhere with”, including this one. Ross was involved in some other company buying up that drug.

You can do trials for covid much cheaper than for cancer drugs. For cancer you’ll often have a list of a smallish number of people and try to find the specific individuals who give you the best chance of a statistically significant result based on comorbidities and such, and have someone specifically approach the people you want. For covid the cheap thing to do is: everyone who comes to your clinic with a cough gets the drug and gets a covid test. Later you find out if they had covid and (thanks to a phone call) what happened to their symptoms. And you can do this sort of thing somewhere like Brazil, instead of doing it in the most prestigious hospital (where there are a bunch of other studies going on distracting people). But it’s kind of a weird thing to do, and if trials fail your investors might be like “why didn’t you do the normal thing?”

philh 14 Oct 2024 20:31 UTC
2 points
0
on: A basic systems architecture for AI agents that do autonomous research

Though this particular story for weight exfiltration also seems pretty easy to prevent with standard computer security: there’s no reason for the inference servers to have the permission to create outgoing network connections.

But it might be convenient to have that setting configured through some file stored in Github, which the execution server has access to.

philh 27 Sep 2024 7:02 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Martin Randall’s comment on: [Completed] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario
Yeah, if that was the only consideration I think I would have created the market myself.

philh 26 Sep 2024 14:57 UTC
19 points
8
in reply to: aphyer’s comment on: [Completed] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario
Launching nukes is one thing, but downvoting posts that don’t deserve it? I’m not sure I want to retaliate that strongly.

philh 26 Sep 2024 10:17 UTC
27 points
12
on: [Completed] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario
I looked for a manifold market on whether anyone gets nuked, and considered making one when I didn’t find it. But:
- If the implied probability is high, generals might be more likely to push the button. So someone who wants someone to get nuked can buy YES.
- If the implied probability is low, generals can get mana by buying YES and pushing the button. I… don’t think any of the generals will be very motivated by that? But not great.
So I decided not to.

philh 28 Aug 2024 12:18 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: I would have shit in that alley, too

No they’re not interchangeable. They are all designed with each other in mind, along the spectrum, to maximize profits under constraints, and the reality of rivalrousness is one reason to not simply try to run at 100% capacity every instant.

I can’t tell what this paragraph is responding to. What are “they”?

You explained they popped up from the ground. Those are just about the most excludable toilets in existence!

Okay I do feel a bit silly for missing this… but I also still maintain that “allows everyone or no one to use” is a stretch when it comes to excludability. (Like, if the reason we’re talking about it is “can the free market provide this service at a profit”, then we care about “can the provider limit access to people who are paying for it”. If they can’t do that, do we care that they can turn the service off during the day and on at night?)

Overall it still seems like you want to use words in a way that I think is unhelpful.

philh 22 Aug 2024 17:34 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: I would have shit in that alley, too
Idk, I think my reaction here is that you’re defining terms far more broadly than is actually going to be helpful in practice. Like, excludability and rivalry are spectrums in multiple dimensions, and if we’re going to treat them as binaries then sure, we could say anything with a hint of them counts in the “yes” bin, but… I think for most purposes,
- “occasionally, someone else arrives at the parking lot at the same time as me, and then I have to spend a minute or so waiting for the pay-and-display meter”
is closer to
- “other people using the parking lot doesn’t affect me”
than it is to
- “when I get to the parking lot there are often no spaces at all”
I wouldn’t even say that: bathrooms are highly rivalrous and this is why they need to be so overbuilt in terms of capacity. While working at a cinema, did you never notice the lines for the womens’ bathroom vs the mens’ bathroom once a big movie let out? And that like 99% of the time the bathrooms were completely empty?
My memory is we didn’t often have that problem, but it was over ten years ago so dunno.
I’d say part of why they’re (generally in my experience) low-rivalrous is because they’re overbuilt. They (generally in my experience) have enough capacity that people typically don’t have to wait, and when they do have to wait they don’t have to wait long. There are exceptions (during the interval at a theatre), but it still seems to me that most bathrooms (as they actually exist, and not hypothetical other bathrooms that had been built with less capacity) are low-rivalrous.
None of your examples are a counterexample. All of them are excludable, and you explain how and that the operators choose not to.
I’m willing to concede on the ones that could be pay gated but aren’t, though I still think “how easy is it to install a pay gate” matters.
But did you miss my example of the pop-up urinals? I did not explain how those are excludable, and I maintain that they’re not.

philh 18 Aug 2024 21:09 UTC
4 points
2
on: philh’s Shortform
Thing I’ve been wrong about for a long time: I remembered that the rocket equation “is exponential”, but I thought it was exponential in dry mass. It’s not, it’s linear in dry mass and exponential in Δv.
This explains a lot of times where I’ve been reading SF and was mildly surprised at how cavalier people seemed to be about payload, like allowing astronauts to have personal items.

philh 18 Aug 2024 18:35 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: dr_s’s comment on: London Rationalish meetup—Lincoln’s Inn Fields
Sorry, I didn’t see this notification until after—did you find us?

philh 16 Aug 2024 11:24 UTC
3 points
0
on: Economics101 predicted the failure of special card payments for refugees, 3 months later whole of Germany wants to adopt it
I agree that econ 101 models are sometimes incorrect or inapplicable. But

I don’t know how much that additional cost is, but seemingly less than the benefit, because three months later, the whole of Germany wants to introduce this card. The introduction has to be delayed by some legal issues, and then a few counties want to introduce it independently. So popular is this special card!

The argument here seems to be that the card must satisfy a cost-benefit analysis or it wouldn’t be so popular, and I don’t buy that either.

philh 15 Aug 2024 7:54 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Smaug123’s comment on: Organisation for Program Equilibrium reading group
Ah, I can sometimes make fridays but not tomorrow. Hope it goes well.

philh 3 Aug 2024 10:53 UTC
2 points
0
on: Multiplex Gene Editing: Where Are We Now?

they turn a C/G base pair to an A/T, or vice versa.

Can they also turn it into a G/C or a T/A? I wasn’t sure if this was an example or a “this is the only edit they do”. Or I might just be misunderstanding and this question is wrong.

philh 23 Jul 2024 8:38 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: rossry’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teaching epistemics. Figgie is a better one.
I think Ben’s proposal is: between rounds, it takes a while to split the whole deck into suits, all hearts in one pile and all spades in another and so on. Instead you can just pick out four hearts, and four spades, and so on, and remove 0/2/2/4 cards from those piles, and shuffle the rest back into the deck. But no matter how you shuffle, I don’t think you can do that without leaking information.

philh

Complex Systems (31 Oct 2024): From molecule to medicine, with Ross Rheingans-Yoo