VipulNaik

Karma: 1,571

VipulNaik 16 Jul 2018 5:11 UTC
26 points
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Raemon’s Shortform Feed
My understanding is that Against Malaria Foundation is a relatively small player in the space of ending malaria, and it’s not clear the funders who wish to make a significant dent in malaria would choose to donate to AMF.
One of the reasons GiveWell chose AMF is that there’s a clear marginal value of small donation amounts in AMF’s operational model—with a few extra million dollars they can finance bednet distribution in another region. It’s not necessarily that AMF itself is the most effective charity to donate to to end malaria—it’s just the one with the best proven cost-effectiveness for donors at the scale of a few million dollars. But it isn’t necessarily the best opportunity for somebody with much larger amounts of money who wants to end malaria.
For comparison:
- In its ~15-year existence, the Global Fund says it has disbursed over $10 billion for malaria and states that 795 million insecticide-treated nets were funded (though it’s not clear if these were actually funded all through the 10 billion disbursed by the Global Fund). It looks like their annual malaria spend is a little under a billion. See https://www.theglobalfund.org/en/portfolio/ for more. The Global Fund gets a lot of its funding from governments; see https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_The_Global_Fund_to_Fight_AIDS%2C_Tuberculosis_and_Malaria for more on their history and programs.
- The Gates Foundation spends ~$3.5 billion annually, of which $150-450 million every year is on malaria. See https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donor.php?donor=Bill+and+Melinda+Gates+Foundation#donorDonationAmountsBySubcauseAreaAndYear and https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donor.php?donor=Bill+and+Melinda+Gates+Foundation&cause_area_filter=Global+health%2Fmalaria#donorDonationAmountsByDoneeAndYear They’re again donating to organizations with larger backbones and longer histories (like PATH, which has over 10,000 people, and has been around since 1978), that can absorb large amounts of funding, and the Gates Foundation seems more cash-constrained than opportunity-constrained.
The main difference I can make out between the EA/GiveWell-sphere and the general global health community is that malaria interventions (specifically ITNs) get much more importance in the EA/GiveWell-sphere, whereas in the general global health spending space, AIDS gets more importance. I’ve written about this before: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1f9/the_aidsmalaria_puzzle_bleg/
What links here?
- Raemon's comment on Earning to Save (Give 1%, Save 10%) by Raemon (EA Forum; 29 Nov 2018 21:02 UTC; 8 points)
- riceissa's comment on Donations List Website: tutorial and request for feedback by riceissa (EA Forum; 25 Aug 2018 2:07 UTC; 6 points)

VipulNaik 4 Oct 2017 16:45 UTC
24 points
on: Writing That Provokes Comments
In my experience, writing full-fledged, thoroughly researched material is pretty time-consuming, and if you push that out to the audience immediately, (1) you’ve sunk a lot of time and effort that the audience may not appreciate or care about, and (2) you might have too large an inferential gap with the audience for them to meaningfully engage.
The alternative I’ve been toying with is something like this: when I’m roughly halfway through an investigation, I publish a short post that describes my tentative conclusions, without fully rigorous backing, but with (a) clearly stated conclusions, and (b) enough citations and other signals that there’s decent research backing my process. Then I ask people what they think of the thesis, which parts they are interested in, and what they are skeptical of. Then after I finish the rest of the investigation I push a polished writeup only for those parts (for the rest, it’s just informal notes + general pointers).
For examples, see https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/ghBZDavgywxXeqWSe/wikipedia-pageviews-still-in-decline and http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1f9/the_aidsmalaria_puzzle_bleg/ (both are just the first respective steps for their projects).
I feel like this both makes comments more valuable to me and gives more incentive to commenters to share their thoughts, but the jury is still out.

VipulNaik 14 Apr 2014 19:38 UTC
19 points
on: [Requesting advice] Problems with optimizing my life as a high school student
Jonah Sinick and I (both frequent LessWrong posters) operate Cognito Mentoring, a free advising service for students and learners. We’d be happy to discuss your situation with you and offer suggestions. Email us at cognitomentoring@gmail.com if you’re interested.

VipulNaik 29 Nov 2016 2:43 UTC
16 points
in reply to: VipulNaik’s comment on: On the importance of Less Wrong, or another single conversational locus
The impression I form based on this is that the main blocker to LessWrong revitalization is people writing sufficiently attractive posts. This seems to mostly agree with the emerging consensus in the comments, but the empirical backing from the survey is nice. Also, it’s good to know that software or interface improvements aren’t a big blocker.

As for what’s blocking content creators from contributing to LessWrong, here are a few hypotheses that don’t seem to have been given as much attention as I’d like:
1. Contributing novel content becomes harder as people’s knowledge base and expectations grow: Shooting off a speculative missive no longer works in 2016 the way it might have worked in 2011 -- people have already seen a lot of the basic speculation, and need something more substantive to catch their attention. But the flip side is that something that’s truly substantive is going to require a lot of work to research and write, and then even more work to simplify and explain elegantly. This problem is stronger on LessWrong because of the asymmetric nature of rewards. On Facebook, you can still shoot off a speculative missive—it’s your own Facebook post—and you won’t get blasted for being unoriginal or boring. A lot of people will like, comment, and share your status if you’re famous enough or witty enough. On LessWrong, you’ll be blasted more.
2. Negative reception and/or lack of reception is more obvious on LessWrong: Due to the karma system of LessWrong, it’s brutally obvious when your posts aren’t liked enough by people, and/or don’t get enough comments. On personal blogs, this is a little harder for outsiders to make out (unless the blogger explicitly makes the signals obvious) and even then, harder to compare with other people’s posts. This means that when people are posting things they have heavy personal investment in (e.g., they’ve spent months working on the stuff) they may feel reluctant to post it on LW and find it upvoted less than a random post that fits more closely in LW norms. The effects are mediated purely through psychological impact on the author. For most starting authors, the audience one reaches through LW, and the diversity of feedback one gets, is still way larger than that one would get on one’s own blog (though social media circulation has lessened the gap). But the psychological sense of having gotten “only” three net upvotes compared to the 66 of the top-voted post, can make people hesitant. I remember a discussion with somebody who was disheartened about the lack of positive response but I pointed out that in absolute terms it was still more than a personal blog.
3. Commenters’ confidence often exceeds their competence, but the commenters still sound prima facie reasonable: On newspaper and magazine blogs, the comments are terrible, but they’re usually obviously terrible. Readers can see them and shrug them off. On LessWrong, star power commenters often make confident comments that seem prima facie reasonable yet misunderstand the post. This is particularly the case as we move beyond LW’s strong areas and into related domains, which any forum dedicated to applying rationality to the real world should be able to do. The blame here isn’t solely on the commenters who make the mistaken assertions but also on the original post for not being clear enough, and on upvoters for not evaluating things carefully enough. Still, this does add to the burden of the original poster, who now has to deal with potential misconceptions and misguided but confident putdowns that aren’t prima facie wrong. Hacker News has a similar problem though the comments on HN are more obviously bad (obviously ill-informed uncharitable criticism) so it might be less of a problem there.
4. Commitment to topics beyond pet rationality topics isn’t strong and clear enough: LessWrong is fairly unique as a forum with the potential for reasonably high quality discussion of just about any topic (except maybe politics and porn and sex stuff). But people posting on non-pet topics aren’t totally sure how much their post belongs on LessWrong. A more clear embrace of “all topics under the sun”—along with more cooperative help from commenters to people who post on non-conventional topics—can help.

VipulNaik 29 Nov 2016 2:23 UTC
14 points
on: On the importance of Less Wrong, or another single conversational locus
I might have missed it, but reading through the comment thread here I don’t see prominent links to past discussions. There’s LessWrong 2.0 by Vaniver last year, and, more recently, there is LessWrong use, successorship, and diaspora. Quoting from the section on rejoin conditions in the latter:

A significant fraction of people say they’d be interested in an improved version of the site. And of course there were write ins for conditions to rejoin, what did people say they’d need to rejoin the site?

(links to rejoin condition write-ins)

Feel free to read these yourselves (they’re not long), but I’ll go ahead and summarize: It’s all about the content. Content, content, content. No amount of usability improvements, A/B testing or clever trickery will let you get around content. People are overwhelmingly clear about this; they need a reason to come to the site and right now they don’t feel like they have one. That means priority number one for somebody trying to revitalize LessWrong is how you deal with this.

VipulNaik 11 Dec 2023 0:49 UTC
11 points
0
on: Send us example gnarly bugs
One particularly amusing bug I was involved with was with an early version of the content recommendation engine at the company I worked at (this is used by websites to recommend related content on the website, such as related videos, articles, etc.). One of the customers for the recommendation engine was a music video service, and we/they noticed that One Direction’s song called Infinity was showing up at the top of our recommendations a little too often. (I think this was triggered by the release of another One Direction song bringing the Infinity song into circulation, but I don’t remember what that other song was).

It turned out this was due to a bug where we were taking a dot product of feature values with feature weights, where the feature value was being cast from a string to a numeric, with a fallback to zero if it was non-numeric, and then multiplied by the feature weight. For the “song title” feature, the feature weight was zero, and the feature value was anyway non-numeric, but even if it were numeric, it shouldn’t matter, because anything times zero is … zero, right? But the programming language in question treated “Infinity” as a numeric value, and it defined Infinity * 0 to be NaN (not a number) [ETA: A colleague who was part of the discovery process highlights that this behavior is in fact part of the IEEE 754 standard, so it would hold even for other programming languages that were compliant with the standard]. And NaN + anything would still be NaN, so the dot product would be NaN. And the way the sorting worked, NaN would always rank on top, so whenever the song got considered for recommendation it would rank on top.

VipulNaik 29 Nov 2016 18:38 UTC
11 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: On the importance of Less Wrong, or another single conversational locus
It could also be a good way for the Internets to give up on trying to talk in a forum where you are around.

VipulNaik 9 Jul 2014 4:17 UTC
9 points
in reply to: jamesf’s comment on: [QUESTION]: What are your views on climate change, and how did you form them?
It’s to indicate that the post is not too substantive in and of itself, and is mostly a bleg. Sort of like people put LINK: in front of posts that are basically just for sharing a link.

VipulNaik 31 Mar 2014 1:20 UTC
8 points
in reply to: ThisSpaceAvailable’s comment on: How valuable is volunteering?
Jobs should not be a terminal value. That’s right. If an activity could be done for free and the activity eliminated the need for a job, that would (most likely) be a net benefit for society.

But, the fact that some people don’t get jobs because of the activity does weigh into the overall cost-benefit calculation, particularly when you’re trying to do something with explicit altruistic motivation.

Suppose Alice can do a job for Bob at the market rate of $20. The opportunity cost of Alice’s time is $15, and the value of the job to Bob is $25 (so they split the social surplus of $10 equally).

Let’s say that the opportunity cost of Carl’s time is $18, but he thinks something like “hey, if I do this job for Bob for free, I can generate a social surplus of $7, whereas if he hired Alice, he’d only get $5 in value.” What Carl is doing is essentially donating $18 of his time to Bob and adding $7 in social surplus, and all of that $25 is captured by Bob. But Carl’s choice reduces social surplus from $10 to $7.

Now, if Carl were not being altruistic, he would charge for at least the $18 that’s his opportunity cost, which is more than Alice’s opportunity cost. Since Alice has lower opportunity cost, she’d bid down her price to below the $18, and Bob would still hire Alice. So, in the absence of altruism, the market mechanism works to maximize social surplus.

But, since Carl is being altruistic, Alice has no way of undercutting him on wages, and Bob, even though he knows that Alice’s time is valued less, is gaining so much more ($25 instead of a measly $5, or even the maximum possible $10 he could get if he bid Alice’s wages down) that he has no incentive to hire Alice.

Anyway, the above illustrative example is just to illustrate why job losses can matter when we introduce altruistic calculation into the market mechanism.
What links here?
- JonahS's comment on How valuable is volunteering? by JonahS (31 Mar 2014 17:34 UTC; 0 points)

VipulNaik 13 Aug 2023 18:59 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: riceissa’s comment on: riceissa’s Shortform
A few thoughts:
- In at least one area, namely cars, durability relative to actual usage has improved a lot over the past 50 years or so. See for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_longevity “According to the New York Times, in the 1960s and 1970s, the typical car reached its end of life around 100,000 miles (160,000 km), but due to manufacturing improvements in the 2000s, such as tighter tolerances and better anti-corrosion coatings, the typical car lasts closer to 200,000 miles (320,000 km).”
- The area where I’m most aware of claims of reduced durability is home appliances e.g. https://ryanfinlay.medium.com/they-used-to-last-50-years-c3383ff28a8e but I think there are a bunch of factors here that make it a little tricky given (a) low cost: there’s a much wider selection of home appliances, and the low end that are quite cheap still last several years, which is obviously less than the high end and the older great devices, but probably good enough and a great comparison to costs. Low-end refrigerators for instance cost only a bit more than phones, which is remarkable considering the size differences! (b) energy use as a major component of cost over the long term: for appliances like refrigerators, the electricity use becomes a major cost component if the appliance lasts too long, so that having a long-lasting refrigerator that doesn’t benefit from energy efficiency improvements may ultimately cost more.
- In the realm of electronics, quality improvements in hardware even over the last 5-10 years have been very impressive; for instance, batteries have gotten better, design/form factors have gotten better. However, repairability in particular has gotten worse but this seems tied to the trend toward miniaturization and portability. If people anyway plan to replace their devices every few years, then portability probably wins over repairability.

VipulNaik 28 Sep 2016 22:56 UTC
7 points
on: Linkposts now live!
I’m unable to edit past posts of mine; it seems that this broke very recently and I’m wondering if it’s related to the changes you made.

Specifically, when I click the Submit or the “Save and Continue” buttons after making an edit, it goes to lesswrong.com/submit with a blank screen. When I look at the HTTP error code it says it’s a 404.

I also checked the post after that to see if the edit still went through, and it didn’t. In other words, my edit did not get saved.

Do you know what’s going on? There were a few corrections/expansions on past posts that I need to push live soon.

VipulNaik 8 Jul 2014 18:30 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: [QUESTION]: What are your views on climate change, and how did you form them?
I think it’s better to make forecasts that are later proved wrong, then acknowledge that they are wrong, make new forecasts and appropriately calibrate the new forecasts based on the lesson learned in humility from the first wrong forecast.

Trenberth in particular seems to be a fairly honest and open climate scientist, in that he made an explicit forecast, then later admitted a change of mind. He’s also the person who admitted (within an email leaked by Climategate) that there was a problem with balancing the energy budget, and he later publicly noted the same, and tried to come up with an explanation.

The problem isn’t with people making wrong forecasts, it’s with people (a) refusing to make forecasts while still implicity doing so by claiming near-certainty about the future and seeking action based on that, or (b) making forecasts and insisting on the forecasts being treated as correct without an external test of validity or a past record of forecasting expertise.

See also:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/05/the_bettors_oat.html

VipulNaik 11 Apr 2014 22:02 UTC
7 points
in reply to: benkuhn’s comment on: Supply, demand, and technological progress: how might the future unfold? Should we believe in runaway exponential growth?
I’m actually writing another (long) post on exponential growth and the different phenomena that could lead to it. Multiplicative costs are on the list of plausible explanations. I’ve discussed these multiplicative stories with Jonah and Luke before.

I think that multiplicative costs is a major part of the story for the exponential-ish improvements in linear programming algorithms, as far as I could make out based on a reading of this paper: http://web.njit.edu/~bxd1947/OR_za_Anu/linprog_history.pdf

More in my upcoming post :).

UPDATE: Here’s the post: http://lesswrong.com/lw/k1s/stories_for_exponential_growth/

VipulNaik 2 Oct 2023 19:39 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: VipulNaik’s comment on: riceissa’s Shortform
Regarding the topic of batteries getting better while also being harder to remove/replace, I found these interesting comments by FeRD (https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/What_to_do_with_a_swollen_battery?permalink=comment-911590#comment-911590 + the next two comments) that I quote in full below:

(1/2) I doubt it’s entirely fair to blame Apple for this; they may not have even been the first manufacturer to use a non-removable battery pack. They were certainly the first biggest company to make that switch, but plenty of others did the same, and in some cases way too quickly for it to have been a case of them “copying” Apple. They simply came to the same conclusion: Removable batteries, like physical keyboards, hurt sales more than they helped. So, out they went.

Because, the frustration of it is that device manufacturers genuinely have really “good” reasons why batteries are no longer removable. Actually, at least two good reasons: Water-resistance and miniaturization.

Today’s phones are surprisingly watertight, to the point where many can survive a brief dunk with no immediate ill effects. (Though I personally suspect that water infiltration is a trigger for subsequent battery swelling.) My Galaxy Note8 once survived a complete submersion lasting 2-3 seconds. Don’t try that with your Nokia 3310!

FeRD—Sep 21, 2023

(2/2) All battery-powered devices are also continually getting smaller and smaller. (Or, failing that, they’re packing more and more stuff into roughly the same amount of space.) And the fact is, removable batteries require MUCH more space than non-removable.

If a battery is removable, it has to have an outer, protective case of its own due to the dangerous chemicals inside. The phone would then also have to have mechanisms to align and secure the battery, a latch and release mechanism, and electrical contacts between what are now (effectively) two completely separate devices. That all takes up space.

A removable battery makes a device significantly larger (in particular, thicker), or else it has half the capacity of the non-removable design. Either way, 999 out of 1000 consumers will choose the smaller, thinner, lighter fixed-battery device with twice the runtime between charges, over a bigger, thicker, doesn’t-last-as-long alternative with a removable battery.

FeRD—Sep 21, 2023

Actually, now that I think about it there’s a third reason that’s even more damning:

Removable batteries were never about extending device lifetime.

Manufacturers will tell you, and they can provide reams of consumer data to back it up: The percentage of consumers who keep a device long enough to wear out the first battery is TINY. Laughably tiny. The overwhelming majority of mobile-device owners want to replace their device with a newer, faster one every 2 years or less — long before the battery is even starting to degrade. (After all, until very recently the technology was advancing so quickly, a 2-year-old phone was nigh-unusable, given its limitations compared to newer models.)

Removable batteries were always intended for power-users who needed more runtime than they could get from a single battery. They’d own two+, and swap them out as needed (charging externally). In the end, rapid charging, larger capacities, and improved power-management software provided a better solution to that problem.

FeRD—Sep 21, 2023

VipulNaik 9 Apr 2020 5:38 UTC
6 points
on: [Announcement] LessWrong will be down for ~1 hour on the evening of April 10th around 10PM PDT (5:00AM GMT)
Do you mean PDT instead of PST in the title?

VipulNaik 15 Jul 2014 0:29 UTC
6 points
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Scenario analyses for technological progress for the next decade
I think continued progress of Moore’s law is quite plausible, and that was one of the scenarios I considered (Scenario #2). That said, it’s interesting that you express high confidence in this scenario relative to the other scenarios, despite the considerable skepticism of computer scientists, engineers, and the McKinsey report.

Would you like to make a bet for a specific claim about the technological progress we’ll see? We could do it with actual money if you like, or just an honorary bet. Since you’re claiming more confidence than I am, I’d like the odds in my favor, at somewhere between 2:1 and 4:1 (details depend on the exact proposed bet).

My suggestion to bet (that you can feel free to ignore) isn’t intended to be confrontational. cf.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/05/the_bettors_oat.html

VipulNaik 10 Apr 2014 1:27 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Bleg: Read and learn, or become an activist?
I agree with you. One argument in favor of activism is that, even if it doesn’t effect immediate change, people learn how to become activists (i.e., they get practical training in activism). That’s the typical argument I’ve seen in favor of activism. What do you think of that?

VipulNaik 8 Sep 2013 17:29 UTC
6 points
on: How valuable is it to learn math deeply?
It’s interesting that the comments on this post are split in terms of whether they interpret the focus to be on math or on deeply. It’s also worth noting that the term “deeply” has many different connotations. Stephen Chew, whom you link to, is using deep learning in the sense of learning something by pondering its meaning and associations. But it’s very much possible for an unsophisticated to learn something deeply in the Chewish sense without acquiring a conceptual understanding of it that has transferable value. For instance, one might “deep learn” the product rule for differentiation:

(fg)′ = f’g + fg’

by saying “each function gets its turn with being differentiated, and then we add up the products.” This is reasonably generalizable (for instance, it generalizes to products of more than two functions, and also to product-like settings in multivariable calculus) but it doesn’t necessarily help with deep conceptual understanding of the rule. On the other hand, the somewhat deeper understanding the product rule for differentiation using the chain rule for partial differentiation (see here) actually helps provide a deep sense of why the result is true.

Now, my example above in some sense disproves my claim. The reason being that the Chewish deep learning of the product rule: “each function gets it chance at being differentiated, and then we add up”—is actually not that far off from the conceptually enlightening explanation based on the chain rule for partial differentiation. So perhaps it is true that attempting Chewish deep learning, without actually having a deep conceptual understanding, enables one to generally get quite close to the correct conceptual understanding.

VipulNaik 25 Dec 2021 2:02 UTC
5 points
on: Quick Poll: Booster Reactions
I just got my booster dose today (December 24) and intend to monitor closely. I’ll be regularly updating https://github.com/vipulnaik/diet-exercise-health/blob/master/notes/2021-12-24-pfizer-covid-vaccine-booster-dose.md with temperature readings and subjective details of my experience.

I did similar logging after the second dose, that you can see here: https://github.com/vipulnaik/diet-exercise-health/blob/master/notes/2021-06-25-pfizer-covid-vaccine-dose-2.md

VipulNaik 25 Nov 2021 4:50 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: Chris Voss negotiation MasterClass: review
Good point! Voss talks a bit about how many of these techniques feel odd. Two points he makes:
- Practice in low-stakes situations to get more comfortable with it. Don’t try any negotiation technique in a high-stakes situation that you don’t have practice with!
- In many cases the discomfort you experience saying it isn’t noticed by others. Voss gives examples related to mirroring as well as to the calibrated question “How am I supposed to do that?” People feel apprehensive asking the question but it usually works despite their apprehension.
I would also add that it’s more important to stick to things you believe in than to try to literally apply something that you feel is bad or wrong. If you’re convinced that, in a given situation, a label of “it sounds like you’re very happy with the way this turned out” is a gaming of the other person, don’t use it. But if in a situation you think it’s actually an accurate label that helps summarize the situation and correctly shows the other person that you are tuned in to what they are feeling and expressing, do it! Just keep an open mind to the possibility of using labels.

Summary (added): Basically I think if you use low-stakes practice and only selectively apply to the real world the skills you are comfortable with, you don’t need to experience an intermittent dip in effectiveness due to not feeling authentic.