Zvi

Covid 8/​6: The Case of the Miss­ing Data

• Zvi 3 Aug 2020 22:43 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: wearsshoes’s comment on: Unify­ing the Si­mu­lacra Definitions

  I’m look­ing for­ward to it.

• Zvi 3 Aug 2020 22:42 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: mr-hire’s comment on: Unify­ing the Si­mu­lacra Definitions

  There are three mis­takes. One is the one you worry about, that lev­els 3 and 4 will be seen as evil and dark arts and avoided, pre­vent­ing effec­tive­ness. You can’t just hit ig­nore.

  The sec­ond is to fail to un­der­stand level 4 and even level 3 and treat them as much less alien than they are with re­spect to lev­els 1 and 2.

  The third is to gaze into the abyss and let it gaze too far into you, and lose your grip on re­al­ity. Elon and Steve and Walt are pretty spe­cial. It’s some­thing to as­pire to.

  Balanc­ing all the mes­sages is hard. And right now, I am wor­ried mostly about the first one.

Unify­ing the Si­mu­lacra Definitions

Covid 7/​30: Whack a Mole

• Zvi 30 Jul 2020 10:15 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: New Paper on Herd Im­mu­nity Thresholds

  No, just no. You are be­ing mis­led. Lots of peo­ple were sick in March and al­most none of them caught it again in July. We know it’s a min­i­mum of 4 months.

  I have talked about this many times in my posts so I won’t say more here.

New Paper on Herd Im­mu­nity Thresholds

• Zvi 27 Jul 2020 0:27 UTC

  19 points

  on: “Should Black­mail Be Le­gal” Han­son/​Zvi De­bate (Sun July 26th, 3pm PDT)

  Con­grats to Robin. He rep­re­sented his side well. Looks like the crowd shifted sub­stan­tially to­wards him af­ter the de­bate.

  I do not think I did as good a job, and in par­tic­u­lar did not think to pre­pare con­crete ex­am­ples where le­gal black­mail would do harm, and had trou­ble think­ing of good ones in the mo­ment. Of course, now, it’s easy to think of a list.

  Part of that, iron­i­cally, is that I was afraid of my state­ments in a pub­lic form im­plic­itly en­dors­ing or ad­mit­ting to some­thing that could be used against me later.

• Zvi 27 Jul 2020 0:19 UTC

  4 points

  on: “Should Black­mail Be Le­gal” Han­son/​Zvi De­bate (Sun July 26th, 3pm PDT)

  Looks like the meet­ing got cut off by the host?

• Zvi 23 Jul 2020 21:19 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Covid 7/​23: The Se­cond Summit

  Yeah, the free ver­sion isn’t dragon, you need to pay $10/​month, will think about whether it’s worth a note up top.

  On the fire alarm, it’s a metaphor, agreed we’re us­ing it slightly differ­ently, if there’s a con­sen­sus this is a prob­lem I can re­word.

Covid 7/​23: The Se­cond Summit

Fresh Bread

• Zvi 19 Jul 2020 22:25 UTC

  21 points

  on: Crit­i­cism of some pop­u­lar LW articles

  I don’t think the crit­i­cism of post 2 here is on point at all. Eliz­a­beth is mak­ing the claim that if ev­ery­one shifted from think­ing dol­lars most re­li­able to think­ing eu­ros, that this would be self-fulfilling and have big im­pacts. This seems right, re­gard­less of why this hap­pened. The re­sponse seems wrong in four ways.

  One, I don’t think that there needs to be an over­ar­ch­ing rea­son. It’s not crazy that a pro­pa­ganda cam­paign (some­one ‘talk­ing their book’ on a large enough level) com­bined with large bets could cause a cas­cade effect in wor­lds where that wouldn’t have oth­er­wise hap­pened.

  Two, it’s the cur­rency and not the stock mar­ket that mat­ters here. Stock mar­ket is a differ­ent thing. Not cen­tral but worth not­ing.

  Three, the cur­rency mar­kets are ex­actly the thing Eliz­a­beth is talk­ing about—an­ti­ci­pated fu­ture prices, which are a func­tion of sup­ply and de­mand. A lot of the de­mand for dol­lars is the ex­pec­ta­tion that peo­ple will de­mand dol­lars be­cause busi­ness with oth­ers is done in dol­lars, etc. Hit­ting the tip­ping point would cause a cas­cade. The idea that mar­kets are about some ‘fun­da­men­tals’ and cau­sa­tion is one-di­rec­tional sim­ply isn’t right. Ex­pec­ta­tions are huge.

  Four, even if in this par­tic­u­lar ex­am­ple we are not close to a switch, that would only mean it’s a bad ex­am­ple. The prin­ci­ple cer­tainly holds. E.g. it is easy to imag­ine wor­lds in which there was a ‘flip­pen­ing’ and ETH took over the BTC role as pri­mary method of cryp­tocur­rency pay­ment some time in 2018, with­out any­thing fun­da­men­tal chang­ing. There’s no rea­son to think that would have be­come un­done—likely the op­po­site, and if ETH had passed BTC it would have pul­led fur­ther away over time.

• Zvi 19 Jul 2020 22:15 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Crit­i­cism of some pop­u­lar LW articles

  Gen­eral in­quiry as to level of ap­petite for this type of crit­i­cism, and whether do­ing such for re­cent posts would be a pos­i­tive or nega­tive for those writ­ing.

  (Not as a ‘should this have been writ­ten?’ but more as a ‘should I/​oth­ers con­sider writ­ing more similar posts?’

• Zvi 18 Jul 2020 11:12 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Rae­mon’s Short­form Feed

  Sounds like mostly low sam­ple size?

• Zvi 17 Jul 2020 13:35 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Covid 7/​16: Be­com­ing the Mask

  Thanks.

  I’ve no­ticed there seems to be a policy of not delet­ing typo threads af­ter they’ve com­pleted their mis­sions, not sure why that’s the case—when I ask for dele­tion af­ter the fix it doesn’t hap­pen.

• Zvi 17 Jul 2020 13:34 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: CellBioGuy’s comment on: Covid 7/​16: Be­com­ing the Mask

  So we can test AB-blood pop­u­la­tions for an­ti­bod­ies and com­pare that to the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion, and you’ll know quickly if this the­ory is right or not?

• Zvi 16 Jul 2020 21:25 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Covid 7/​16: Be­com­ing the Mask

  Agreed that this is how most peo­ple seem to effec­tively act, so you need to find a rule to tell them that 80/​20s things as best one can. It’s un­for­tu­nate that this is *wildly* worse than hav­ing a gears model, but dunno what can be done about that.

• Zvi 16 Jul 2020 21:24 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: CellBioGuy’s comment on: Covid 7/​16: Be­com­ing the Mask

  In­ter­est­ing.

  What’s the prac­ti­cal im­pli­ca­tion if true? Pre­sum­ably it im­plies things like “You’re type A so you go to the type O butcher’s shop, or have an office meet­ing with a Type O col­league, and ev­ery­one is safe?” Does that mean that type A peo­ple be­come more valuable be­cause there are less of them and they match eas­ier? What about type B? Are ABs worse than As or are they now su­per­stars? Etc.

  Does this mean that blood rel­a­tives are in gen­eral more likely to in­fect within-house­hold than friends or spouses, since their types match more of­ten? Any im­pli­ca­tions? Etc.

• Zvi 16 Jul 2020 21:19 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: adamzerner’s comment on: Covid 7/​16: Be­com­ing the Mask

  I as­sume China is at least do­ing a cost-benefit—it’s risky and ex­pen­sive to do the vac­ci­na­tions, and it’s not a great source of in­for­ma­tion on whether it works, so the benefits at that scale are mostly be­cause you think it will likely work. I agree that it’s much less ev­i­dence than if e.g. Ger­many were do­ing it!

  I dunno if see­ing sports played to empty sta­di­ums sig­nals much of a re­turn to nor­mal­ity. I agree that sports shut­ting down was a big wake-up call, and helped a lot, but I think ev­ery game will have a definite air of ‘things are not nor­mal’ when they pan to empty fan sec­tions, see the sidelines full of masks and dis­tanc­ing, and talk about which teams have had test­ing con­cerns. It might even model good be­hav­ior.