Economist.
Sherrinford
Karma: 829
I endorse the current LW system where you can talk about politics but it’s not frontpaged.
Would you please briefly define what you consider to be politics? I would assume that posts calling for the “delenda” of the WHO or using wordings like “Second-worst person New York Mayor DeBlasio” or affirmatively citing this tweet are political. And these posts seem to be frontpaged.
I completed the survey!
I’d still like to ask those questions (or a similar set of questions) somewhere. If someone has an idea where and how that could make sense, feel free to answer that as a comment to mine.
Sorry, but I’ll comment on a meta level. I find the topic interesting and am interested in reading such discussions; but may I ask the admins what the current policy regarding frontpaging politics is? Last time I checked, It seemed that the rule was that only Zvi is allowed to write politics for the frontpage… Now the post already starts off with a subjective worldview and presents it as objective (e.g. the “interests” of the US that are stated as facts without evidence or discussion; the “liberal world order (LWO), also known as the ‘rules-based international order’” is presented as an objectively existing thing, the US is claimed to unambiguously protect it, and to have designed it “to maximize economic and political power of the United States”). I don’t mind forum posts and discussions on that level, but I have a preference for consistency. So just to be sure: Is this kind of politics discussion now encouraged?
As always, interesting overview and very useful cost-benefit Fermis etc. As usual, I’m confused by some generalizing statements.
The WHO and EMA said there was no evidence there was an issue.
The EMA says:
EMA’s safety committee, PRAC, concluded its preliminary review of a signal of blood clots in people vaccinated with COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca …
the vaccine is not associated with an increase in the overall risk of blood clots (thromboembolic events) in those who receive it;
...
however, the vaccine may be associated with very rare cases of blood clots associated with thrombocytopenia, i.e. low levels of blood platelets (elements in the blood that help it to clot) with or without bleeding, including rare cases of clots in the vessels draining blood from the brain (CVST).
These are rare cases – around 20 million people in the UK and EEA had received the vaccine as of March 16 and EMA had reviewed only 7 cases of blood clots in multiple blood vessels (disseminated intravascular coagulation, DIC) and 18 cases of CVST. A causal link with the vaccine is not proven, but is possible and deserves further analysis.
… Overall the number of thromboembolic events reported after vaccination, both in studies before licensing and in reports after rollout of vaccination campaigns (469 reports, 191 of them from the EEA), was lower than that expected in the general population. This allows the PRAC to confirm that there is no increase in overall risk of blood clots. However, in younger patients there remain some concerns, related in particular to these rare cases.
The Committee’s experts looked in extreme detail at records of DIC and CVST reported from Member States, 9 of which resulted in death. Most of these occurred in people under 55 and the majority were women. Because these events are rare, and COVID-19 itself often causes blood clotting disorders in patients, it is difficult to estimate a background rate for these events in people who have not had the vaccine. However, based on pre-COVID figures it was calculated that less than 1 reported case of DIC might have been expected by 16 March among people under 50 within 14 days of receiving the vaccine, whereas 5 cases had been reported. Similarly, on average 1.35 cases of CVST might have been expected among this age group whereas by the same cut-off date there had been 12. A similar imbalance was not visible in the older population given the vaccine.
The Committee was of the opinion that the vaccine’s proven efficacy in preventing hospitalisation and death from COVID-19 outweighs the extremely small likelihood of developing DIC or CVST. However, in the light of its findings, patients should be aware of the remote possibility of such syndromes, and if symptoms suggestive of clotting problems occur patients should seek immediate medical attention …
The PRAC will undertake additional review of these risks, including looking at the risks with other types of COVID-19 vaccines (although no signal has been identified from monitoring so far). …
Sorry for the lengthy quote, but I think it’s worthwhile to read this, and I think it does not fit your description. I think that’s not saying there was no evidence of an issue, it’s saying there maybe was an issue among younger people and PRAC should look into that issue, but cost-benefit analysis says vaccination is still much better.
Given the different age groups affected and analyzed, I would like to understand what your “So it’s not remotely fair to use the background population rate when you’re explicitly targeting your elderly population for vaccinations.” sentence means. Which background population rate was used by the authorities? (By the way, the media in Germany noted that the difference between UK and EU may be due to the fact that the age groups receiving AZ in these places are different. That is, AZ in Germany was seemingly given to young nurses, many of which are women, because it was restricted to people under 65.)
For your “sequence of events”, as always I’d be happy to know whether “there’s extensive reporting of anything that happens to people right after getting the vaccine” is actually true. Intuition tells me that there’s also extensive reporting of symptoms of COVID-19 in times of a COVID-19 pandemic, but in fact there’s a relevant amount of unknown cases additional to official numbers. If headaches are the symptom of the relevant blood clots, should we really expect overreporting? My intuition would be that people underreported this symptom, in particular because everyone has heard that you should expect to feel sick etc after being vaccinated. On the other hand, after this discussion and media coverage, I expect people to report headaches more often, and this would also happen without any government-imposed interruption of the vaccination campaign—maybe even more so.
Being a European, I guess I must have lost my mind, so I don’t really understand what “All of this due, effectively, to pure p-hacking, without even bothering to pretend otherwise.” is supposed to mean. “p-hacking” would be intentional behavior, in particular combined with the “pretend” part. So you imply that there was an intention by analysts in some agency to stop the vaccination? And “without even bothering to pretend otherwise”, that is, they also said so? (But then again, seeing the Samo Burja tweet and the text around it, I guess it’s not even necessary to present a plausible mechanism how such things work. “Malice”, “madness”, etc. I can imagine the government meeting: “How do we cover up our failure?” “Let’s stop vaccination by pointing out blood clots! We understand statistics perfectly, so we know that the experts in the Paul Ehrlich Institute are wrong, but due to our malice and madness, we follow their recommendation.”)
“but you have a legal obligation to these people that forces your hand, because ‘there could be legal consequences’? And there’s no way to, say, pass a new law to fix that, even if you should have fixed it long ago? So that’s it, nothing you could do, huh? ”
If I am not mistaken about the Bundestag procedures, the interruption of vaccination did not take long compared to the time it takes to change a law.
Probably because I am not in the US, I do not exactly understand this. Who would be the people having to flee?
This post explicitly says that its aim is not to explain what it states. Instead, the author says that people can check sources etc “elsewhere”. Among the large number of claims and “principles” are, effectively, a call to “war” against US and international institutions, and a nonsensical claim about “governments most places”. And when curating the post, you tell people to “check claims for themselves”. We have discussed these or similar points with respect to previous covid-19 posts, so these norms on lesswrong are not surprising anymore, but they are disconcerting.
“People don’t want to do new things.”
Uhm, depends. I think many people are quite enthusiastic if they think they can contribute to something exciting and new, and then lose interest if turns out to be less exciting, less new, and is hard, boring work.
Some points from an interview with virologist Hendrik Streeck who is leading a systematic study in the German town of Gangelt in the county of Heinsberg, one of the epicenters of Corona in Germany (https://www.zeit.de/wissen/gesundheit/2020-04/hendrik-streeck-covid-19-heinsberg-symptome-infektionsschutz-massnahmen-studie/komplettansicht, ZEIT online, April 6, interviewed by Jakob Simmank and Florian Schumann):
The team is testing, for the first time, a representative sample (1,000 from 500 households) for Germany on whether they are infected with Corona virus (smear test and antibody blood test).
There was a famous carnival event in Heinsberg and in Germany it is kind of common knowledge by now that the large outbreak in Heinsberg can be traced back to that event. In the study, people were asked whether they attended that event, whether they had pre-existing conditions or take any medications; and all participants of that event were finally tested, and the researchers are reconstructing who sat next to whom and talked to whom. People had assumed that infection had spread via insufficiently clean draft-beer glasses; this seems to be wrong, most people had bottled beer. Moreover, people got ill a day or so after the event, which does not fit the incubation time. There is a school nearby in which seemingly almost all pupils and parents were ill in January. These people are now tested for antibodies.
In February, during the initial breakout in Heinsberg, the homes/apartments/houses of infected people where tested, and this is now done for newly infected as well. This includes taking air samples and samples from remote controls and door knobs. Up to now: 70 households, but they are planning for a larger sample.
They found viruses on things or door knobs and (once) in toilet water when somebody had diarrhea, but not once did the researchers succeed in breeding intact viruses from these samples. This suggests that most people are not infected via surface viruses.
The team had been among the first to find loss of taste and smell as a symptom. Now the data shows that about a third of patients have diarrhea, sometimes for several days, which is more than was assumed. Moreover, Streeck says his team heard from somewhere else several times (but not yet found in their own samples) that people report of deafness and dizziness. He says that these are things nobody originally paid attention to because they do not fit a respiratory disease. The interviewers note that it fits reports of headache and other nerve-system symptoms including findings of brain damage in the case of deceased patients (https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/radiol.2020201187). Streeck notes that Sars-CoV-2 is a surprising virus and mentions a two-phase pattern (pharynx first, lung later). He also mentions that authors of another study found the virus in blood samples, while the Heinsberg researchers did not find that among their 70-person sample (and that it could be possible that the virus only enters the blood in severe cases, but not the mild ones).
Both from Heinsberg and from other cases, Streeck states that infection mostly seems to happen via relatively close contact (he mentions that transmisisons of/via haircutters, taxidrivers etc did NOT seem to happen in one famous and well-researched case in Munich, but that basically the whole network of infection can be often be reconstructed).
He notes that sitting in your apartment and not getting any sun is bad for your immune system, and curfew-like restrictions and behavioral recommendations should be more evidence-based.
Bing already has human-level intelligence and access to most of the internet. Speculating how long before Bing or another LLM becomes superhuman smart is a scary thought, especially because we haven’t even managed to align Bing yet.
Given the distribution of human intelligence, I find it hard to say when something should be considered “superhuman smart”. Given the behavior of Bing, I am unsure whether we could really realize it, even if there was a clear cut-off level.
After having been accepted, the paper is retracted but Frontiers in Psychology says it “did not identify any issues with the academic and ethical aspects of the study. It did, however, determine that the legal context is insufficiently clear and therefore Frontiers wishes to retract the published article.”
This is a nice post about an interesting topic. I think it may be helpful to mention that several of these points are discussed extensively in economics, polsci and game theory, though sometimes with a different vocabulary. (But maybe it is somehow intentional to not mention that, in order to keep the post shorter?)
“Successfully meeting up is still far more important than the location chosen, but given a successful meetup, you both disagree on preferred location.” This resembles the BoS game.
In the section “Powerless Underlings: Intentionally Destroying Communication Channels”, I like the idea of destroying communication channels after leaving a coordination message and find it an original idea. The store-clerk example could benefit from mentioning that there is a large literature on optimal delegation, for instance to a bureaucratic agent. This includes models of delegation as a commitment device, also modeling how much leeway you should leave to the agent you delegate to. Sometimes it makes sense to delegate to agents with preferences different from your own. In the 1980s that was the reason modeled in the literature on conservative central bankers. There are also papers on delegating the authority to bargain for you, I think I have seen that in the context of climate change papers.
Another point is that I think it would be helpful to define what exactly you call “negotiation game” more explicitly. Intuitively, I would say that the original usage of the term “Schelling point” or “focal point” suggests that it should be possible to write it down as a simultaneous-move game, and I don’t think that applies to every kind of negotiation (but I am no expert on how the term is used).
Signaling theory as a term in economics or game theory usually refers to the analysis of situations where an agent takes an action that transmits information that some other agent (or rather, the “principal”) does not have, and which influences the principal’s behavior. The agent is also often called the sender and the principal the receiver of the signal.
Often, this is information about the agent, but sometimes it is information about something else, so we can generally just say it is information about “the state of the world” or “the state of nature”. Usually, signaling theory is concerned with situations in which the information cannot be transmitted by “mere assertion” (or “cheap talk”, see below) but only by a costly action, and the cost of transmitting information about certain states of the world has to be different from transmitting information about other states of the world in certain ways; e.g. in Spence’s job-market signaling model, low-ability workers must have a higher cost of attaining education than high-ability workers, otherwise low-ability workers would also do it and the signal is worthless. (Note that in these models, the agent moves first and the principal second, but still the principal offers a contract based on the received information. If the principal moves first and offers a contract to the informed agent, we are in contract theory. Signaling theory and contract theory together are sometimes referred to as “information economics”, “economics of asymmetric information”, or sometimes the “theory of incentives”.)
Situations in which there are no such costly signals are usually called “cheap talk” models. Of course, if there is no conflict of interest, the informed party can always just transfer the information (and there would also be no need for costly signals then). But suppose there is a conflict of interest between the informed sender and the uninformed receiver. Then which kind of information is transmittable? The seminal paper is by Crawford and Sobel. They show that, basically, very fine-grained information transmission does not work when there is a conflict of interest.
Finally, if a sender can send costless credible signals but can strategically choose which ones, we are in the domain of “Bayesian persuasion” models.
(If you can send signals that are costless and there is no conflict of interest, then we are maybe back in basic statistical theory if the signals are noisy, but I guess there is no room for an economic analysis.)
I do not know the Gillette ad, but your posting’s title caught my attention and so I read the first section (“Boys Will Be Boys”). I stopped reading there because it gets confusing.
1. You seem to find categories like “traditional male” quite important. But then you seem to reserve the word “traditional male” for things that you like. But equating “traditional” with “of the things that have, for at least some decades, been seen as characteristics of what men should do, those that we still like today and don’t find toxic” kind of needs a redefition of the word “traditional”. This seems to me a bit like a true-scotsman definition.
2. You list some “traits and behaviors” that you consider “remarkably traditional male traits and behaviors”. But:
a) Not all are only “present and praised among men”. So why should I call them male? Is accountability “male”? Why should be more “male” than “female”?
b) Nor are they the only “traditional male traits and behaviors”. (see above)
c) Nor can all men comply with this list. If you have no superior strength, then you cannot “Using your superior strength to break up fights between smaller males.” It will be hard to “demonstratively protect women from other men”, or from anybody.
d) Fatherhood without any qualifiers sure is “behavior” if it only means “men having children”. It is by definition only “male”, but you can just replace it by writing “parenthood” and then it’s not even gender-specific: The praiseworthy behavior then would be praiseworthy for both men and women. (See a) above) Similarly, you can just rephrase “Using your superior strength to break up fights between smaller males.” into “Using your superior strength to break up fights”, and rephrase “demonstratively protect women from other men” to “demonstratively protect weak people”. (This is more a superhero trait than a male trait, and even if it has been traditionally been identified with being men, I don’t know why to defend this identification.)
f) “Teaching all of the above to your son.” is also unnecessarily narrowly defined. If we rephrase the terms as I did, I can also teach it to my daughter.
3. Summarizing, I see why your selective categorization is useful if you like to promote the concept of masculinity (and I can imagine that this is also useful for a company that needs customer loyalty of a target group, and collective identity helps in getting there). But if we want to use words like “traditional” with their… traditional meaning, then I don’t find your categorization particularly convincing. On the other hand, if this helps people to behave better because they identify as “traditional males” and search for lists of traits and behaviors for that, that’s ok.
4. Nonetheless, in the last paragraph in that section you talk about an “APA’s attack on traditional manhood”, referring to your other list:
Here is a list of things APA considers “harmful”, under the umbrella term of “traditional masculinity”:
Stoicism.
Competitiveness.
Aggression.
Dominance.
Anti-femininity.
Achievement.
Adventure and risk.
Violence.
Providing for loved ones (if you’re a black man).
That made me curious, so I googled to find the document (https://www.apa.org/about/policy/boys-men-practice-guidelines.pdf) where the APA does that. I searched for “stoicism”. It appears in the following contexts:
“Psychologists strive to use a variety of methods to promote the development of male-to-male relationships. Toward addressing this goal, psychologists recognize and challenge socialization pressures on boys and men to be hypercompetitive and hyper aggressive with one another to help boys and men develop healthy same-sex friendships. Interactive all-male groups, (Levant, 1996; Mortola, Hiton, & Grant, 2007), self-help books (Garfield, 2015 Smiler, 2016), and educational videos (Hurt & Gordon, 2007; Katz & Earp, 2013) may be helpful or utilized. Psychologists also strive to create psychoeducational classes and workshops designed to promote gender empathy, respectful behavior, and communication skills that enhance cross-sex friendships, and to raise awareness about, and solutions for, problematic behaviors such as sexual harassment that deter cross-sex friendships (Wilson, 2006). Psychologists can discuss with boys and men the messages they have received about withholding affection from other males to help them understand how components of traditional masculinity such as emotional stoicism, homophobia, not showing vulnerability, self-reliance, and competitiveness might deter them from forming close relationships with male peers (Brooks, 1998; Smiler, 2016). In that vein, psychologists strive to develop in boys and men a greater understanding of the diverse and healthy ways that they can demonstrate their masculinities in relationships.” (p. 11)
and
“Psychologists also strive to reduce mental health stigma for men by acknowledging and challenging socialized messages related to men’s mental health stigma (e.g., male stoicism, self-reliance).” (p. 18)
So in both contexts, that does not say whether stoicism is good or bad in itself. It says there may be problems caused by it (in particular, in the context of people who have mental-health problems). First, stoicism may be a problem when men would like to form “close relationships with male peers”, and it may increase the perceived stigma of mental-health problems, and both things may need to be addressed.
Competitiveness? See the p.-11 paragraph above. “Hypercompetitive” behavior is seen as a potential cause of problems, “and competitiveness might deter them from forming close relationships with male peers”, and neither statement implies that you should drop all competitiveness (and not even that competitiveness should not be seen as a positive value in general). The word also appears on page 13:
“Psychologists can promote strengths of father involvement. For instance, active play and physical exercise with their children have been linked to higher levels of father involvement and better child health (Berg, 2010; Fletcher, Morgan, May, Lubans, & St. George, 2011; Garfield & Isacco, 2012). According to Bogels and Phares (2008), active play between fathers and children has a functional element correlated with several positive child outcomes, such as competitiveness without aggression, cooperation that buffers anxiety, healthy experimentation, social competence, peer acceptance and popularity, and a sense of autonomy.”
To me this sounds a lot like the behavior that your own lists imply.
So up to here it seems a bit like the APA describes problems that may be caused by some parts of what is traditionally part of the umbrella term “masculinity”, and then you say: “Naming such traits and kinds of behavior is bad, because I like the term ‘masculinity’ and want to fill it with my own values.” (But that would imply the opposite meaning of the word “traditional” compared to parts of the definition in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/traditional ). So if you state there is an “attack on traditional manhood”, which meaning of the word “traditional” you use here, and where I can see this attack. (But maybe you are referring to a different document by the APA?)
“And then if you say that it’s actually fine because overall this US-led world order is pretty good they’ll ask what the fuck you’re talking about, it’s horrible!”
I am not very confident about this US international order thing, but there is a difference between knowing that things are bad compared to some ideal world and having an idea how to get there.
Maybe another reason why it might not have been such a great fitness advantage is that activity was effectively constrained by daylight availability?
“but it may mean a few months of never leaving the house without a positive-pressure suit”
This suggests that the air outside your house is densely infected with corona viruses? Which reminds me of the pictures of Chinese large-scale disinfection spray in cities. Is there any evidence that that is sensible and effective?
There is a study reconstructing how Coronavirus spread in Austria (link to German summary article on Spiegel Online). The researchers found not a single infection cluster in schools or Kindergarten, and not a single case where a child was the source of infection in a family. The conclusions of the study include (short version of the points listed in the article I am linking to):
people infect others before (they realize) they have symptoms,
infection takes place within few days after infection (3 to 5 days),
transmission happens when several people are at the same place for a longer timespan (about 15 minutes),
for most clusters, point expositions were found: one person is at the beginning of the chain, and there are more infections when that person has contact to other persons for a longer timespan (probably they mean the 15 minutes from the previous point)
quarantine measures and barriers work,
there are currently no transmission chains that would give evidence to transmission via public transport or visiting a shop.
Summarizing an article on gloves: https://www.n-tv.de/panorama/Einweghandschuhe-so-wichtig-wie-Masken-article21689035.html (April 2)
First, about virus survival on surfaces in general:
Germany’s (kind of celebrity) virologist Christian Drosten’s (Berliner Charité hospital) opinion on the study about survival rates of Sars-CoV-2 on surfaces and the possibility of smear infection:
He hypothesizes that for the experiment, dass für den Versuch Viruses in a larger drop were put on the surface, and even though in this way you can verify infectiosity even after hours, probably only very few viruses survived. On fingers, the amount of viruses decreases further and gets into contact with the acidic milieu of the skin, and it is unclear whether anything remains; similarly simple experiments cannot simulate that. The German federal institute for risk assessment states that it currently does not know of Sars-CoV-2 infections via touching surfaces.
Note that I neither checked the statements cited, nor the sources; this is simply a translation and summary of a paragraph from the article. Starting from this, the article writes about disposable gloves.
The article states that gloves are of course considerable but that you of course should not touch your face with the gloves, and that it should also be considered that Sars-CoV-2 viruses seem to survive longer on plastics etc than on skin, that also bacteria thrive on gloves more than on hands and gloves distribute them more than hands do. Moreover, if you wear them for a longer time, the skin sweats and swells, which opens an entry to the body for viruses and bacteria. Finally, taking the gloves off without touching them is not as easy as you might think, and disposing them should of course be done properly, some people just leave them in the shopping cart.
The article basically recommends to prefer washing your hands and not touching your face over using disposable gloves. It also kind of suggests that gloves can be the opposite of face masks in one sense: Simple face masks do protect other people, while gloves may even make matters for other people worse.
Okay, maybe I should rephrase my question: What is the typical AI safety policy they would enact if they could advise president, parliament and other real-world institutions?
You list many examples why it’s good being fast. But who doubts that it is good being fast, smart, rich or healthy (ceteris paribus)? The critical point, given your motivating example and the title of the post, would be evidence for the sentence “Being impatient is the best way to get faster at things.”