Connor_Flexman

Karma: 1,554

Connor_Flexman 6 Oct 2023 8:00 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Thomas Kwa’s MIRI research experience
Re rockets, I might be misunderstanding, but I’m not sure why you’re imagining doubling the number of molecules. Isn’t the idea that you hold molecules constant and covalent energy constant, then reduce mass to increase velocity? Might be worth disambiguating your comparator here: I imagine we agree that light hydrogen would be better than heavy hydrogen, but perhaps you’re wondering about kerosene?

Connor_Flexman 14 Jun 2023 2:38 UTC
7 points
2
on: Noting an error in Inadequate Equilibria
I’m aware this is kind of hard to justify, but I’m basically an apologist on this one. I think he was mostly right and just exaggerated the measurable magnitude. It’s just so damn hard to come up with examples that are not only true and illustrative and compelling and not confusing, but also very measurably true. I do wish he had provided a more justifiable core example and overstated the result less, but I do basically the same when I’m trying to make a point. On my list of metrics I think he satisficed basically fine—I can’t think of any better examples off the top of my head from pre-COVID.
[ETA: someone asked why I thought the effect size was more than 0, which is a good question that I was trying to dodge… Here’s my attempt at some justification.
First: the “reality drives straight lines on graphs” thing. The line of your economy growing stays straight because you keep doing things to make the economy keep growing. Every time someone does something to boost the economy, that line gets a little straighter. If they didn’t fix the money supply they probably would have started growing less, but they did fix it because it was the next bottleneck and that’s how lines stay straight. I’ve seen a lot of times where an intervention that has to have a clear effect by any model of the world just doesn’t show a clear effect on graphs. So at this point I’m not that convinced by being unable to pick signal out of the noise.
Second, as someone else pointed out, they once again didn’t print enough money. So while Eliezer did exaggerate to say that they had actually fixed the problem and seen his preferred result, I think he was still directionally right: they did a small intervention, it helped some, and doesn’t really show up because they didn’t do enough. It wasn’t a Volcker situation where he really drilled it into people.
Third, least convincingly, I’m just schizo enough to be able to eyeball those graphs and say sure, does look a bit like prime LFPR was up faster. And after a crunch you’re supposed to see catch-up growth, and in this case it does seem like the catch-up growth of Japan was slower than I’d expect and the post-catch-up was equally fast but relatively faster (compare Germany’s RGDP, the first non-US country I looked at). Also, I hear there was some sort of economic problem around 2014-2015 maybe? Anyways this is of course in the context of point 1, where normally it’s hard to see anything on a graph.
Fourth, again in the context of point 1, in cases like this I’d lean more on models and historical context for what we know must be going on, rather than actually expecting to see the results clearly in any given case. And I feel pretty confident that increasing the liquidity available in a faltering economy HAS to increase GDP—like, decreasing it surely decreases GDP, right? So by the reversal test…]

Connor_Flexman 14 Jan 2023 18:45 UTC
2 points
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Connor_Flexman’s Shortform
Clinton’s campaign was against Bush, so they were throwing these words back at him.

Connor_Flexman 8 Jan 2023 2:55 UTC
2 points
on: Connor_Flexman’s Shortform
A Few Lessons from Dominic Cummings on Politics
Barbell model of voters (or “delusion of the centre”), where many in the electorate are far to the left of politicians on white collar crime and higher taxes on the rich but far to the right of politicians on violent crime, anti-terrorism, and immigration.
You want to be empirical in a way almost all in politics aren’t: run tons of focus groups and really listen to how your voters think, not just what policies they want.
Use a best-in-class data model. Polls naturally swing all over, much polling is bad; if you use these, make them Bayesian and get great people who really know what they’re doing to figure them out. Then use these models to focus relentlessly on whatever has the largest effect size, which is swing voters. [Some other tricks here that seem worth not being as explicit about.]
Don’t be patronizing, do have integrity—very hard in politics.
Stay on message. Bill Clinton’s campaign had 3 talking points, each phrased to maximize punch. “It’s the economy, stupid”, “read my lips”, and another that I forget. Carville was incredible at focusing relentlessly on turning every interview question into a response on one of these three. People won’t care about most of the stuff you could talk about, and you can’t optimize everything, so just choose the few best messages that are most powerful to people and drive everything back to them. Watch The War Room about the Clinton campaign if you haven’t yet.

Connor_Flexman 9 Jun 2022 9:35 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Matthew Barnett’s comment on: Visible Homelessness in SF: A Quick Breakdown of Causes
Note that
A) zooming in on most city hubs will find you monetary concentrations like this, e.g. Manhattan has a GDP pc of $370k
B) I have never actually heard anyone argue that making the city richer is the path to solving homelessness despite living there for a long time, so suspect this might be an error—are you conflating this with deregulating the housing market? Or do people actually argue somewhere that more money would solve homelessness?

Connor_Flexman 8 May 2022 11:37 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Nanda Ale’s comment on: Experience on Meloxicam
~same. I use a Kinesis Freestyle with 20″ cord, that finally ~fixed my wrists after 4 years, and I’m extremely excited for the Kinesis Advantage360 coming out some time this year.

Connor_Flexman 8 May 2022 11:23 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Tornus’s comment on: Home Antigen Tests Aren’t Useful For Covid Screening
I think my current expectation of risk reduction from antigen tests is more like 20-60% than <10%, but I’ll also note that it matters a lot what your population is. In Elizabeth’s social circle my guess is that most people aren’t coming to parties if they’ve had any suspected positive contact, have any weak symptoms, etc, such that there’s a strong selection effect screening out the clearly-positive people. (Or like, imagine everyone with these risk factors takes an antigen test anyways—then requiring tests doesn’t add anything.)

I haven’t read this whole thread but for the record, I often agree with Michael Mina and think he does great original thinking about these topics, yet think in this case he’s just wrong with his extremely high estimates of antigen test sensitivity during contagion. I think his model on antigen tests specifically is theoretically great and a good extrapolation from a few decent assumptions, but just doesn’t match what we see on the ground.
For example, I’ve written before about how even PCRs seem to have 5-10% FNR in the hospitalized, and how PCR tests look even worse from anecdata. Antigen tests get baselined against PCR so will be at least this bad.
We also see things like a clinical trial on QuickVue tests that shows only ~83% sensitivity. Admittedly other studies of antigen tests show ~98% sensitivity, but I think publication bias and results-desirability bias here means that if the clinical trial only shows 83%, then that’s decent evidence that studies finding higher are a bit flawed. I would not have guess they could get to 98% though so there’s something that doesn’t make sense here.
I know the standard heuristic is to trust scientific findings over anecdata, but I think in this case that should be reversed if you’re extremely scientifically literate and closely tracking things on the ground. Knowing all the things that can go wrong with even very careful scientific findings, I just don’t trust these studies claiming very high sensitivity much—I think they also contradict FDA data on Cue tests, data/anecdata about nasal+saliva tests working better than just nasal, etc.
(Maybe I’m preaching to the choir and you know most of this, given your range was 25-90%. But I guess I see pretty good evidence it can’t possibly be at the high end of that range.)

Connor_Flexman 26 Mar 2022 0:25 UTC
5 points
on: Connor_Flexman’s Shortform
Reminder that US is crossing 50% BA.2 in the next few days, CA and NY have started to uptick, so probably in 4 weeks it will be a serious wave peaking in like 6-8ish weeks. Plan accordingly!
(So ~4 weeks where things are fineish, then ~7 weeks where rates are higher, then 4 weeks to come back down. I.e. plan for May and June to have lots of COVID, and potential restrictions to continue into July.)

Connor_Flexman 25 Mar 2022 20:11 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Connor_Flexman’s Shortform
I at least partially agree with this. I’m less interested in virtue signaling per se than I am in using it as a brief exploration to highlight a common misconception about how signaling works. Plausibly virtue signaling isn’t the clearest example of this, but I do think it’s a pretty good case of the broader point: people tend to talk about signals mostly when they are deficient in various ways, but then that tarnish rubs off onto all signaling universally. I think it’s really important that signals are extremely good in general, except ones that are dumb because they’re costly to implement or goodharted or what-have-you. This really does not come through when people talk about signaling.

Connor_Flexman 23 Mar 2022 23:02 UTC
7 points
on: Connor_Flexman’s Shortform
Remember remember remember, costly signaling is supposed to be about cost-to-fake, not cost-burnt-to-signal. It is not like Bitcoin. If you own an original Picasso, it is costless to show that you own it, but very costly for someone to fake owning it (have to commission an elaborate copy).
“Virtue signaling” should be thought of with this in mind. If you or someone else is frowning upon a virtue signal, that’s not because of the inherent structure of signaling. It means either it’s a corrupted signal, they’re being annoying with their signal, or it’s not a signal to begin with. For example, if someone can post a bunch of tweets about Latest Crisis
costlessly, that’s not really a costly signal to begin with. If someone volunteers for many hours at soup kitchens to be a politician even though they hate it, that’s a corrupted signal. If you casually drop all your volunteering accolades in conversation apropos of nothing, that’s a real signal but really annoying.
In many ways this structure mirrors force projection! Cf Luttwak’s Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. In the same way that good force projection doesn’t require costly forces to be applied, good signaling doesn’t require cost to be burnt on a signal. The adept will signal perfectly fine through various proofs provided, without breaking social norms or splurging resources.

Connor_Flexman 21 Mar 2022 7:38 UTC
6 points
on: Connor_Flexman’s Shortform
Mimesis has re-revealed its awesome and godly power to me over the last few months. Not Girardian mimesis, but hominid mimesis. Best way to do almost anything is to literally copy others, especially the best people but really the triangulation between any few people will do. Don’t know how to write an email? Copy it from an email you received. Don’t know how to do any chore, cooking, dance, etc? Just look it up on youtube. This is a long ways from Connor of 2018, who fastidiously avoided watching youtube videos of poi so I could explore it all on my own for months.
Mimesis has a bad rap in my local culture. But, huge postulate: mimesis is ONLY bad when coupled with such tight need for approval that it is a hard constraint on what you can do. That’s the combination that results in whole segments of society that can’t innovate, can’t fix basic problems, general cheems mindset. In our scene of non-conformists, there is essentially no downside, I postulate!
You can make arguments like “thinking things through for yourself first can help avoid anchoring”, or “you can genuinely learn better if you take a first stab yourself and then see the diff”. Sure, but I think these are the exception that proves the rule. Holding off on mimesis is very useful in a few contexts, and all the time for a few occupations; for most people, 99% of stuff is best to do starting from the shoulders of giants. If you like thinking for yourself, trust me that you will do that just the same while cooking from a recipe compared to trying to derive it yourself. If I had just started learning poi as the experts do it, I would have much more quickly gotten to a place where creative energy and first principles yielded interesting new results, rather than just new results.

Connor_Flexman 5 Jan 2022 22:45 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Adam Selker’s comment on: Six economics misconceptions which I’ve resolved over the last few years
I think I basically mean it straightforwardly. In my mind it is pretty similar to other moral injunctions like “tell the truth” or “speak up for the bullied”—it is important to resolve to do it ahead of time, because in the moment it might be quite hard and costly to do so. So if someone were to start talking about how actually the bullied need to learn to stick up for themselves, etc etc, I would want to remind myself and others that while this is true, it shouldn’t change my moral resolution to stand up to bullying. (It’s perfectly fine for people to discuss whether maybe we shouldn’t stand up for them, but if someone gives an argument that doesn’t apply, or evidence that later turns out to be false, I want to again reiterate the resolution.)
Maybe this is overkill or something but I think it feels pretty straightforward to me. I think sometimes my moral resolutions do in fact get eroded by people questioning them, and not “re-committing” afterward.

Connor_Flexman 3 Jan 2022 20:33 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Adam Selker’s comment on: Six economics misconceptions which I’ve resolved over the last few years
There are plenty of things you should still resolve to do. You don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater by maintaining maximum irresolution so you’ll never have difficulty changing your mind. Just change your mind when important evidence comes in—and in this case, I’m trying to point out that it is not important evidence against internalizing externalities. (It is evidence against levying the full externality cost and failing to try mitigating trades that reduce that externality cost.)

Connor_Flexman 27 Dec 2021 5:50 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Zvi’s comment on: Omicron Post #7
Given that serial interval is a very effective way to amplify an already-high R0 to great evolutionary advantage, and common colds/flu etc all have developed serial interval of more like 1-2 days showing there’s plenty of room for COVID to climb in this regard, I would expect lots of new dominant strains to show shortened serial interval regardless of heritage.
Not sure if there’s publication bias or measurement bias here but the first link on google shows a study estimating Omicron serial interval at 2.2 days in South Korea.

Connor_Flexman 20 Dec 2021 6:49 UTC
2 points
in reply to: KatjaGrace’s comment on: COVID and the holidays
Ah, good point.
The main reason I don’t automatically make a huge adjustment for this is that it seemed that there were still ~25% false negatives at peak contagiousness by PCR according to some studies. And 40% false negatives a few days later. All sort of things are possible, like that these studies included many asymptomatic and acontagious cases, but having seen anecdotal corroboration of this phenomenon, I’m inclined to think something weird is going on.
But I should give some weight to it though—perhaps 2x less ineffective when compared to contagiousness, so maybe 60% efficacy for rapid and 75% for PCR?

Connor_Flexman 20 Dec 2021 4:57 UTC
4 points
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: COVID and the holidays
Good point re the urban centers, was pretty dumb of me to forget to adjust for that. I’ve added two ETAs to the post to account for this.

Connor_Flexman 20 Dec 2021 4:42 UTC
6 points
on: Omicron Post #7
I can’t confirm you didn’t talk about this, but the only thing of importance I haven’t seen you mention in these is that the serial interval might be much smaller (eg as mentioned here), so that R0 and number of secondary infections is not so vastly higher even as we see incredibly fast doubling times. I think people don’t realize how much this effect played a part in Delta’s containability, even while Delta overtook other variants very quickly and it seemed pretty concerning at the beginning.
Specifically, if Omicron is tearing through vaccinated populations because it has 5x higher immune escape than Delta, ²⁄₃ the serial interval, and 1.5x the transmission (which I think roughly fits the SA data), then we might see the Omicron wave ending up surprisingly containable—only needing behavior to curb the 1.5x transmission and to go back to pre-vaccine (Jan 2021) measures to fix the immune escape.
I don’t put much probability on this since I don’t know a ton about omicron and I haven’t heard people talking about it much, but it seems like it’s still an overlooked phenomenon re Delta and so I wouldn’t be surprised if it made omicron a lot more containable than I’ve seen implied. Admittedly people seem very done with countermeasures at this point, so we still might be screwed (and screwed quickly if serial interval is in fact a big driver), but I wouldn’t actually be all that surprised if the control system kicked in in a few weeks and the wave peaked fairly quickly.

Connor_Flexman 20 Dec 2021 3:08 UTC
8 points
on: What Caplan’s “Missing Mood” Heuristic Is Really For
I think you’re right that the initial blog post is repeatedly making a big mistake: running into a values difference and using the mood argument as evidence against the position.
I think to turn this into a useful heuristic, the patch is to reverse the order of operations. If you go from Noticing Missing Mood → Be Suspicious you can easily used this to tar your political opposition. But if you go from Intuition of Suspicion → Look for Missing Mood, it can be a highly productive heuristic for determining what seems to be wrong with someone’s argument, whether or not that actually makes it wrong. You can immediately find cruxier issues between you and your political opponent (like the values differences above). This post seems to do that well.
Doing this on your own beliefs is arguably the most productive! “Huh, shouldn’t I also feel sympathy towards the people my proposed policy hurts?”

Connor_Flexman 19 Dec 2021 10:20 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Yandong Zhang’s comment on: COVID and the holidays
Yes, it definitely will, and yes that will be unacceptable. Will that be because of vaccinated scrupulous LessWrong-reading mask-wearing 30yos during the holidays? No. That will contribute much less harm-to-benefit than many, many other actions.

Connor_Flexman 19 Dec 2021 10:14 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Yandong Zhang’s comment on: COVID and the holidays
First, I think we are all still pretty far from living as normal. Many things in our past lives would have been more than 1k microcovids.
Second, even the most informal versions of test and trace (telling your friends if you develop any symptoms, so they can tell their friends) can significantly reduce transmission rate.
Third, all this is in the context of the holidays. Fourth, 30yos are not the only segment of society. Fifth, the health care system is not yet close to capacity in almost all places (if your local hospitals are overwhelmed, obviously do not act normally). Etc