TheMajor

Karma: 934

TheMajor Jun 3, 2020, 9:37 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: My prediction for Covid-19
Thank you for your comment. I don’t think we disagree—Slovakia (and other European countries) have done extremely well by acting quickly. I also fully support washing hands, wearing face masks and being smart about social contact. I think you are responding to my sentence
[...] this suggests to me that ‘The Dance’ will look a lot more like ‘a full quarantine, but with a few restrictions lifted’ than like ‘restoring social contact, but wash your hands and wear a face mask’.
I’m sorry for the confusion. The situation you describe sounds more like my scenario 3 than my scenario 2, and I think I explained poorly where I draw the line in my quoted statement above. Going by wikipedia, the most recent round of relaxations in Slovakia still sounds far from life as normal to me. The maximum occupancy set at shops is up to 1 person per 15 square meters, which is 25% of what it is in normal times. I imagine similar concerns apply to offices, but I can’t find how many people are back to working at the office. The opening of schools happened only this Monday, so it really is too early to tell what the impact of that will be. Zvi voices some concerns.
Lastly, my entire goal was to try and talk about relative impact, and give perspective to the magnitude of the measures we can expect going forwards. I don’t see where I have mistakenly given absolute statements on effectiveness of measures (in fact I only mentioned face masks once, without making any statement for or against them in the OP), but if you point them out I would be happy to change them.

TheMajor Jun 1, 2020, 1:04 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: axioman’s comment on: My prediction for Covid-19
I agree completely. However, I think the amount it has gone up is critical here. A lot of the countermeasures and increased preparation are linear countermeasures against an exponential threat—maybe a region that could previously only handle 1000 ICU patients can now take care of 2000, but if R0 is significantly above 1 (lets say 1.5) this only buys you about one and a half week. I think this topic deserves its own entire post at some point, and I didn’t want to get bogged down in details in the section on “What doesn’t change”, but if the true rule is “if under X circumstances in March it was smart to go into lockdown, it is November smart to go into lockdown 2 weeks after seeing X” my conclusions are still the same.
I might write that full post sometime on this and more back-and-forth, if people are interested. I made serious concessions to brevity above.

TheMajor Jun 1, 2020, 9:03 AM
5 points
0
in reply to: waveman’s comment on: My prediction for Covid-19
Thank you for your comment! I’d like to briefly clarify that I don’t consider the “lockdown versus kill the people” question a dilemma—I’m not trying to propose policy, just attempting to make realistic predictions for the next few months.
I think going for the approach you suggest (‘option 2’) is unrealistic in most western countries, and that the countries where this strategy worked had unique circumstances that worked in their favour.
As gbear605 points out, it is a lot more difficult to revert to this strategy when the disease is endemic, compared to when the number of active cases is in the several hundreds. In the post I link to an estimate of 1.1 million active cases of Covid-19 in the US today. One of the bigger weak links in the non-quarantine approach is that, when people test positive for cold/flu symptoms, there needs to be some plan or support in place to thoroughly isolate them for up to two weeks. At lower numbers this can plausibly handled by hospitals or nursing homes (which has been a big part of South Korea’s method), but at up to a million cases this is unrealistic. In effect this would be akin to a lockdown with some extra steps.
Another advantage that South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore (as far as I know the biggest success stories of this method) had is that they are geographically isolated. I imagine this cuts down on the threat of re-infection from outside the country, and also why it is so much more difficult to prevent Covid-19 from becoming endemic in the US.
Widespread screening for elevated temperatures and cold/flu symptoms sounds like a very clever (and cost-effective!) method to combat the virus, if we also have a plan ready for people who test positive. But I don’t think it can be the success story in western countries that it is in some Asian countries. We either missed our window and let Covid-19 grow too much, or we never had a window to begin with.

As for your later two points, I believe I addressed those in the original post. I think bringing R0 down to around 1 and keeping it there is prohibitively taxing, in multiple ways, and that even slight relaxation of our response will already have severe consequences. We should be thinking on the R0 scale, which runs from about 0.7 to about 2.5-3. Also I explicitly mention that I am fine with leaving the level at which we achieve herd immunity open for debate (I give 20% as a somewhat lower bound, based on estimates that this exposure level has already been reached in NYC).

My prediction for Covid-19

TheMajorMay 31, 2020, 11:25 PM

17 points

11 comments6 min readLW link

TheMajor May 31, 2020, 8:38 PM
2 points
0
on: Covid-19: My Current Model
Excellent post, thank you for writing this! I’ve been meaning to write up something similar, about my opinion on the public response to COVID-19 and a few future predictions. I think this comment section is a perfect place for this, and I’ll write my own thoughts as a response to yours. My experiences are not based on the situation in the USA.

As a disclaimer, my predictions are among the most pessimistic of all the ones I’m seeing people discuss. Consider it the bottom pit of the Overton window. Having expectations that COVID-19 will be worse than people are thinking so far can and does have negative effects on your mental health, so be careful (and stop reading). I’d love to be proven wrong.

Risks Follow Power Laws

Amazingly written, I did not give this enough thought. I should stop doing my own grocery shopping, and have it delivered instead.

Sacrifices To The Gods Are Demanded Everywhere

I agree fully. Your steelman hits quite close to the mark in my opinion. I want to add that if everybody has internalised that ‘pleasing the Gods’ is the way to respond (to anything, really), then this actually becomes the correct way for authorities to write guidelines – anything else will just add another layer of translation.

Governments Most Places Are Lying Liars With No Ability To Plan or Physically Reason. They Can’t Even Stop Interfering and Killing People

Yes.

Silence is Golden

I am completely unsure on the relative importance of this, compared to other risk factors. How much of the spread are you willing to attribute to this? Have there been studies on this?

Surfaces Are Mostly Harmless

I have been keeping all packages that arrived in a sealed plastic bag for 24 hours before opening (like a Good Boy), I guess that was stupid. Reading this paragraph changed my mind.

Food Is Mostly Harmless

Yeah, this all makes sense.

Outdoor Activity Is Relatively Harmless

As does this.

Masks Are Effective, And Even Cloth Ones Are Almost Enough

I totally disagree with this. Where are the numbers coming from? I consider cloth masks closer to a Sacrifice to the Gods than a real countermeasure.

Six Feet Is An Arbitrary Number, People Aren’t Treating It That Way, And That’s Terrible

You have this one completely backwards. People really really are not able to make risk assessments and benefit analyses. This world you describe, where the rule is taken as a best point estimate, and people interpret the ‘6 feet’ as anything else than a Boolean yes/no question, was never going to happen. I consider the current public awareness of the importance of keeping distance an amazing improvement on the status quo before this rule went public. You mention this (as the opening sentence, in fact). I disagree with any suggestion that we could plausibly do better collectively.

Herd Immunity Comes Well Before 75% Infected and Partial Herd Immunity Is Super Valuable

This is a very good point, but can you explain the numbers you give below? I have no intuition on what typical spread in personal infection risk is (sure, the range is large, but we also need the frequencies with which these high risks are taken).

Yes, We Know People Who Have Been Infected Are Immune

I agree fully.

Our Lack of Experimentation Is Still Completely Insane

Agreed.

We Should Be Spending Vastly More on Vaccines, Testing and Other Medical Solutions

I agree here, except with the last line. With all the regression to the mean the current medical system is experiencing, it is totally unclear to me how we would plausibly create a vaccine on a short (“a few months”) timescales.

R0 Under American-Style Lockdown Conditions Defaults To Just Under One, Which New York Escaped Via Partial Herd Immunity

Another great observation, and I’ll reply in more detail in a separate post..

The Default Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) Is 0.5%-1%, Depending on Conditions

There has been discussion of this on LessWrong before, and I agree.

Typically in America, 33% of Deaths and 90% of Infections Are Missed

This sounds like the correct order of magnitude for both, and also agrees with my estimates for the under-reporting in the official numbers where I live.

People Don’t Modify Behavior In Response To Re-Openings All That Much, When Given a Choice

This title is a very important (positive) remark, because it suggests (contrary to what I personally believe) that it might be possible to resume a lot of activities almost as normal while maintaining R0<1. I agree that the situation for schools is uniquely bad, and unfortunately I can tell you from personal experience this is one of the places completely infected with making Sacrifices to the Gods. This is a disaster waiting to happen.

It’s Out of Our Hands

When was this window for people in authority? Looking back I honestly think we were never capable of dodging this disaster (our society isn’t adequate at the level of saving people during a pandemic).

TheMajor May 9, 2020, 4:15 PM
LW: 3 AF: 2
0
AF
on: Corrigibility as outside view
Both outside view reasoning and corrigibility use the outcome of our own utility calculation/mental effort as input for making a decision, instead of output. Perhaps this should be interpreted as taking some gods-eye-view of the agent and their surroundings. When I invoke the outside view, I really am asking “in the past, in situations where my brain said X would happen, what really happened?”. Looking at it like this I think not invoking the outside view is a weird form of duality, where we (willingly) ignore the fact that historically my brain has disproportionately suggested X in situations where Y actually happened. Of course in a world with ideal reasoners (or at least, where I am an ideal reasoner) the outside view will agree with the output of my mental progress.

To me this feels different (though still similar or possibly related, but not the same) to the corrigibility examples. Here the difference between corrigible or incorrigible is not a matter of expected future outcomes, but is decided by uncertainty about the desirability of the outcomes (in particular, the AI having false confidence that some bad future is actually good). We want our untrained AI to think “My real goal, no matter what I’m currently explicitly programmed to do, is to satisfy what the researchers around me want, which includes complying if they want to change my code.” To me this sounds different than the outside view, where I ‘merely’ had to accept that for an ideal reasoner the outside view will produce the same conclusion as my inside view, so any differences between them are interesting facts about my own mental models and can be used to improve my ability to reason.

That being said, I am not sure the difference between uncertainty around future events and uncertainty about desirability of future states is something fundamental. Maybe the concept of probutility bridges this gap—I am positing that corrigibility and outside view reason on different levels, but as long as agents applying the outside view in a sufficiently thorough way are corrigible (or the other way around) the difference may not be physical.

TheMajor Apr 14, 2020, 8:38 PM
6 points
0
on: Is this viable physics?
I’ve tried to read through the linked page, and swapped to `academic reading’ (checking the pictures, and sometimes the first and last line of paragraphs) halfway through. I think this is not viable.

There is a host of “theories of the universe” with a similar structure on a meta-level, consisting of some kind of emergent complexity. It is important to keep in mind the strength of a theory lies in what it forbids, not in what it permits. To date most theories of the universe fail this test hard, by being so vague and nonspecific that any scientific concept can be pattern-matched to some aspect of it. Judging by what I’ve read so far this is no exception (and in fact, I suspect that the reason Wolfram references so many big scientific theories is because large concepts are easier to pattern-match, whereas specific predictions are not as open to interpretation). Why will his patterns produce Einstein’s equations (note that they currently do no such thing, he states we first need to “find the right universe”), and not Newton’s, or Einstein’s with double the speed of light?

As always with these nonspecific `theories’ it is very difficult to nail down one specific weakness. But currently all I’m seeing are red flags. I predict serious media attention and possibly some relevant discoveries in physics (some of the paragraphs sounded better than all other crackpot theories I’ve seen), but the majority of it seems wrong/worthless.

TheMajor Apr 14, 2020, 8:09 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: Coronavirus: Justified Key Insights Thread
I don’t have a good model to give me any predictions on what reasonable numbers of asymptomatic cases would be, or how truncation influences these numbers. Could you explain why the inference is idiotic, and perhaps give a more reasonable one?

TheMajor Apr 14, 2020, 7:24 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: Coronavirus: Justified Key Insights Thread
Is there reason to believe the raw numbers are more accurate estimate of the rate than the model prediction? Also, what are the type-1 and type-2 errors of the tests used on the Diamond Princess? I heard some early reports that both of these might be significant, but then never heard anything about them again.
I checked that link above and followed their references to find other datasets, but two of them are in Japanese, one only deals with self-selected patients who showed symptoms, and the last two have small sample size (12 patients, two papers cover the same event).

Update: I have found https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.3.2000045, which benchmarks the real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCT) tests. They state zero false positives in a trial with 297 non-COVID-19 samples, although they do retest 4 samples that showed “weak initial reactivity”. Since the non real-time version of RT-PCT is supposed to be even more reliable, this means false positives are presumably not a big deal (even at a pessimistic 4/297 false positive this still means only 41 false positives out of 3063 tests done on the Diamond Princess).

TheMajor Apr 14, 2020, 8:17 AM
21 points
0
on: Where should LessWrong go on COVID?
I think it is still very unclear what the situation a medium (~a few months) to long (~a year) amount of time from now will be like. I would love to see more discussion on this. On a related note, I think mental health and self-help are going to very important very soon, and while I am in a fine place personally I would still like to know a lot more about this, including how to help others. This strays a little bit from the other COVID discussion topics, but I do think LessWrong might have a comparative advantage here (especially compared to the crapshoot baseline that is the internet).

TheMajor Apr 14, 2020, 7:49 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Coronavirus: Justified Key Insights Thread
Have you got a source for that ‘about half the cases are asymptomatic’? I was under the impression that far more cases show symptoms eventually, and that the studies showing half of the infections are asymptomatic add the disclaimer ‘so far’, which means very little if the spread is growing exponentially with a doubling time of several days.

TheMajor Apr 8, 2020, 5:34 PM
5 points
0
in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: How strong is the evidence for hydroxychloroquine?
Thanks for sharing! I’m not a doctor, so I found this a tough read. This document is clearly a proposal (attempting to convince the reader) instead of a summary, but it still contains a lot of useful information. Nevertheless, there were some parts I found especially confusing.
On page 2 they mention there are currently 22 studies, of which one has completed, on the effect of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) treatment on COVID-19 patients. Further down in the piece (in particular in the section “What about the studies that show no benefit from HCQ?” on page 11) they dismiss some studies showing little or no effect. Is there a place to find more discussion on which studies are being discounted, and for what reason? They link one study only, citing that “only 400mg daily for 5 days was used”, although the suggested treatment in this document is “HCQ: 6.5-15mg/kg PO in divided loading dose followed by 400-800mg/day in divided doses for 4-9 days” (which encompasses 400mg daily for 5 days).
The recommended treatment is a combination treatment with four different components—an initial oral hydroxychloroquine administration and a daily treatment of hydroxychloroquine and two other medicines (zinc and Azithromycin). Furthermore the document states that this treatment is expected to work a lot better in early stages of the disease (this part is also unclear to me—again on page 11 they state that “[some studies] waited to initiate treatment until the disease was too far progressed to be effective” as grounds for dismissal). Does this mean this treatment is expected to have next to no effect in late stages? I’m worried about Bonferfoni-esque situations here; are 21 incomplete and 1 complete study strong enough to motivate this complicated treatment, especially if we allow ourselves to discount some papers with conflicting conclusions as well as restrict the time period over which the treatment is supposed to be effective?

TheMajor Apr 6, 2020, 8:42 AM
2 points
0
on: How strong is the evidence for hydroxychloroquine?
I am very interested in discussion on hydroxychloroquine, but do not have a Facebook. Is there some other way to read the megathread?

TheMajor Apr 4, 2020, 9:16 AM
4 points
0
on: A Kernel of Truth: Insights from ‘A Friendly Approach to Functional Analysis’
Very nice! Two mistakes though:
- Technically the introductory part on derivatives on $R^{n}$ is incorrect, in two different ways.
  - Firstly the derivative of a map $f : R^{n} \to R$ is a map $f^{'} : R^{n} \to L (R^{n}, R)$ , that assigns to every point x a linear map sending direction y to a real value (namely the partial derivative of f at x in direction y). Thankfully the space of linear maps from $R^{n}$ to $R$ is isometrically isomorphic to $R^{n}$ through the inner product, recovering the expression you gave. Similarly the derivative of a map $f : R^{n} \to R^{m}$ is a map $f^{'} : R^{n} \to L (R^{n}, R^{m})$ .
  - Secondly technically the domain of any derivative like the one above is not the vector space we are working with, but the set of directions at point x. This notion is formalised in Manifold theory and called the tangent space. Thankfully for any finite-dimenional vector space the tangent space at any point is canonically isomorphic to the vector space itself (any vector is a direction, that’s what they were invented for). In infinite dimensions this still holds just fine except for the small detail that the notions of manifold and tangent space don’t exist there. The same distinction is necessary in the range. So truly, formally, the derivative of a map $f : R^{n} \to R$ is a map $f^{'} : T R^{n} \to T R$ , with $T R^{n} = ⋃_{x \in R^{n}} T_{x} R^{n} \equiv R^{n} \times R^{n}$ and similarly $T R = ⋃_{y \in R} T_{y} R \equiv R \times R$ , with the condition that $f^{'}$ is simply $f$ on the first coordinate. This coincides with the map above: for every $x \in R^{n}$ we get a linear map $f^{'} (x) : T_{x} R^{n} \to T_{f (x)} R .$
  - The above may seem very confusing for $n = 1$ , since I claim that the derivative in that case is a map $f^{'} : R \to L (R, R)$ instead of simply a real-valued function. This is resolved by noting that each linear map from $R$ to $R$ can be represented with a number, similar to the top bullet point above (the inner product on $R$ is just multiplication). I think lecturers are quite justified in not exploring the details of this when first introducing derivatives or partial derivatives, but unfortunately in possibly infinite-dimensional abstract vector spaces the distinctions are necessary, if only to avoid type errors.
- In the definition of the partial derivative of M at f with respect to g (so with a range inside a vector space Y) we do not take the norm or absolute value of that expression, it should be the straight up limit ${lim}_{λ \to 0} \frac{M (f + λ g) - M (f)}{λ}$ . The claim that the limit exists does depend on the topology of Y and therefore on the norm, though.
Also there are a lot of discontinuous linear maps out there. A textbook example is considering the vector space $P [0, 1]$ of polynomials interpreted as functions on the closed interval $[0, 1]$ , equipped with supremum norm. The derivative map $\frac{d}{d x} : P [0, 1] \to P [0, 1]$ is not continuous, and you can verify this directly by searching for a sequence of functions that converges to 0 whose image does not converge to 0.

TheMajor Apr 4, 2020, 8:54 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: A Kernel of Truth: Insights from ‘A Friendly Approach to Functional Analysis’
Personally I did the exact opposite, and found that very refreshing. Whenever I ran into a snippet of applied functional analysis without knowing the formal background it just confused me.

TheMajor Mar 28, 2020, 10:44 PM
4 points
0
on: What are the best online tools for meetups and meetings?
I have a bit of a negative answer, in the sense that I don’t know what to recommend. A lot of people in my life (colleagues, friends, family) want to stay in touch (and I with them), but each person seems to have their own preferences about software, or at least sufficiently many subgroups of them do that no single tool will suffice. At this point I honestly think that it’s not so much the quality of the tool, but more who are already using it, which determines which software is best. If you and your friends all used to meet on Minecraft every Tuesday, then that is probably the ideal way to keep doing things.
As of yet I’m using Skype, WhatsApp (+WhatsApp Web), personal email, two work emails, two Discord clients (one in browser, one as an app, with separate accounts), my phone, two Slack workspaces, weekly Zoom group meetings, Google Talk, MS Teams and the occasional Jitsi call. This is crazy, but all of them are sufficiently low traffic that I don’t really mind.
All of them work fine, I do have mild personal preferences (for Slack, Discord and my phone over all the others) but like I said above it’s far more relevant to stay in touch at all than to do it with the right tool.

TheMajor Mar 22, 2020, 10:19 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: The Hammer and the Dance
I have no idea what you mean, sorry.

TheMajor Mar 22, 2020, 10:05 AM
5 points
0
on: The Hammer and the Dance
I am quite underwhelmed by this article. The first half neatly summarizes some statistics and plans that have been proposed, and the potential impact of these. I like this a lot, and the strong line (further down in the article)
If you’re a politician and you see that one option is to let hundreds of thousands or millions of people die with a mitigation strategy and the other is to stop the economy for five months before going through the same peak of cases and deaths, these don’t sound like compelling options.
accurately summarizes my feelings on the measures I’ve seen so far.
However, almost immediately after the first half the article changes tone dramatically, and I feel uncomfortable with most of the remainder. The entire argument hinges on being able to control ‘the Dance’. Personally I think there is little to no chance of this working, due to the sheer amount of public cooperation and government coordination required for the measures you suggest. I’m willing to dismiss the examples of South Korea and Singapore as unique circumstances that do not readily apply to a lot of western countries (for example Singapore is tightly confined geographically and implemented their measures very early), an argument which is presented and immediately dismissed in the article without elaboration.
I would love to see a more quantitative analysis of what this dance would look like in a western country. The article states that the impact of contact tracing, travel restrictions, big crowds and plausibly other measures are vastly understated—what is the quantitative impact of these? After the excellent introduction I was expecting an equally high level summary of this new strategy, but instead it was only motivated by analogy and rhetoric.

TheMajor Mar 16, 2020, 8:02 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: gilch’s comment on: Meetups in the era of COVID-19
Yes, the bullet point list is for Discord. I only tried Jitsi for an hour or two, but the quality of the call was horrible and the session crashed when a second person joined (so really I could just see my own face, pixellated). When I tried to download the Ubuntu client I got dpkg errors and a failed installation. Maybe Jitsi is actually great(?), but I’m not very tempted to try again without outside help.

TheMajor Mar 15, 2020, 6:07 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: philh’s comment on: Meetups in the era of COVID-19
I’ve been looking into ways of staying in touch with people while in quarantine, in particular Skype, Discord, Slack and now recently also Jitsi. Personally I have to unfortunately keep using all because of confusing Venn diagrams and people who are not tech savvy, but if you have the option to choose I recommend Discord over all the alternatives:
- I think it works on all these operating systems, I can personally confirm Linux, Windows and Android. I did have some sound quality issues with voice conference calls on Android, but I doubt any competing software does better.
- You all need to download the client to have video calls. You can have group voice calls and text messaging in-browser. [EDIT: for clarification, if some but not all of you have a client, those last few will not be able to send video. I don’t know if they can still watch other people’s video, they can definitely just join as a voice call.]
- Regardless of the choice above you do need to make an account.
- The quality is very decent. Setting the right sensitivity setting for your own microphone can be a bit finicky (the ‘automatic’ option is not always great). Other than that I have no complaints.
- If the organiser leaves everybody can continue (in fact, people can spontaneously make more events provided the organiser has set these permissions). The way I’ve been holding events with Discord there’s really more of a ‘moderator’ (with the permissions to kick people form the server) than an ‘organiser’, although in practice these are often the same person.
- Yes, there is text chat. Split in channels at your own desire, with option to link to other channels/specific messages and more. You can also have text channels and voice channels open simultaneously, These are open at all times, completely independent of the voice channels.

TheMajor

My pre­dic­tion for Covid-19

My prediction for Covid-19