Connor_Flexman

Karma: 1,556

Connor_Flexman Dec 19, 2021, 10:14 AM
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

Connor_Flexman Dec 17, 2021, 9:34 PM
3 points
in reply to: Tobias H’s comment on: COVID and the holidays
Ah, stocking up on $2 tests would be awesome! That I would certainly endorse.

My reasoning on antigen false negatives is coming from a few lines of evidence. Perhaps I can share some later. But in short, 1) lots of studies have found much higher than average false negative rates, so results are high-variance/heterogeneous 2) my anecdotal counts of people around me concords with the above studies 3) my prior is fairly high on studies overestimating the efficacy of tests, based on BOTH lab conditions being extra controlled and on scientists being biased toward finding higher efficacy (and this affecting studies in a real way that is hard to control for). Thus my preferred resolution of the mystery between anecdotal efficacy and average study efficacy is that studies overestimate efficacy.

Connor_Flexman Dec 17, 2021, 12:17 AM
3 points
in reply to: Tobias H’s comment on: COVID and the holidays
Regarding timing, I think you want to test the day of. The day before is probably fine too. But Delta seemed like it was progressing fast enough that a 1-day lag would lose you a large chunk of the effectiveness.
Regarding mentioning testing in general—I think it helps a little but not enough to matter in most cases. I’m under the impression that PCR tests have a false negative rate of about 50% and antigen tests 70%, which basically translates into risk of .5x and .7x for an event. But if you’re home for the holidays, you’d have to keep testing repeatedly if you wanted this risk multiplier to extend, otherwise you might just develop sickness later.
So a $30 test for people only matters if you are going to an event where the average person is losing more than an hour of life, which is maybe 1000+ microcovids. I don’t think this comes up super often. However, I guess it’s not crazy to take 7 tests over a week to save people several days of life over the holidays. Maybe I should have added this actually. I guess it just seems like it won’t be cost-effective for the overcautious people (and will be overused!) and won’t be attention-effective for the undercautious people. But probably I should have thought through and been clear about this.

Connor_Flexman Dec 16, 2021, 1:48 AM
5 points
in reply to: mwacksen’s comment on: COVID and the holidays
Using a counterfactual of “getting COVID a few years later and you balance out” is certainly tempting, but I don’t think that’s really how it would go down. Based on how vaccine efficacy wanes, reinfections occur, and new variants are introduced, my guess is that you lose all your immunity and more within 2 years, plus in the next decade we probably will develop increasingly effective drugs against it. Hard to sum everything up but my guess is that getting COVID causes a benefit that is less than half the badness. Probably I should make a best guess here and add it at some point in time but this is the type of factor of <2 that occasionally pop up on either side that I typically ignore.

Connor_Flexman Dec 15, 2021, 1:31 AM
4 points
in reply to: cistrane’s comment on: COVID and the holidays
But also you might lose less than two days. I think two days in expectation is actually quite conservative and it’s actually more like 1 day lost in expectation

Connor_Flexman Dec 9, 2021, 10:42 PM
9 points
in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: COVID and the holidays
Oh no, I only meant to recommend masks in the lead-up to the gathering, not the actual gathering itself. You are absolutely right and I’ve edited to make this clear.

COVID and the holidays

Connor_FlexmanDec 8, 2021, 11:13 PM

71 points

31 comments9 min readLW link

Connor_Flexman Dec 8, 2021, 1:26 AM
8 points
in reply to: Beeblebrox’s comment on: Let’s buy out Cyc, for use in AGI interpretability systems?
(In a P/E ratio, the “earnings” is profit, which in Cyc’s case is probably negative. Gwern is using a P/S ratio, price to sales where sales=revenue, since these are usually used for startups since they’re scaling and earnings are still negative. 5 seems reasonable because, while P/S can go much higher for startups rapidly scaling, Cyc doesn’t seem to be rapidly scaling.)

Connor_Flexman Nov 17, 2021, 3:14 AM
2 points
in reply to: rossry’s comment on: Sci-Hub sued in India
Hopefully my comment above makes this more clear now, but the 37% is supposed to imply the extremely strong pricing power / oligopoly position / lack of competition and that the true cost of production is more like 1-10% than 63% of their revenue. Perhaps I should have made this more clear.
Anyways, I think this is in fact a major aspect of my true objection; if there were a bunch of small journals of academics competing and universities couldn’t afford them, it would be less obvious the first step to take.
Hopefully also clear now: I’m not trying to use arguments as soldiers here, but I am trying to quickly summarize the state of things from my perspective, and am not being incredibly careful with all my wordings. E.g. that whole section is not even accurately “why Sci-Hub exists”—Sci-Hub exists because Alexandra believes in open science. But it’s trying to gesture at background reasons why Sci-Hub still exists. Many other mistakes like this—if I had a year I would have taken the time to write a better post.

Connor_Flexman Nov 17, 2021, 3:03 AM
4 points
in reply to: rossry’s comment on: Sci-Hub sued in India
What I meant here was not that the problem was a 37% surcharge, it was that the problems were all the ones associated with a 37% OPM oligopoly in science.

First, Viliam had the right idea in the comment below—the costs rise to meet the revenue, and much of the “expenses” are going to be useless administrative bloat in a thousand different ways. The non-profit version could be run at about literally 1000x less cost: https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/1219365213201264640.

But again, the problem isn’t so much the money wasted as the practices implied. To maintain 37% OPM as a large company with bloative force means you have some serious pricing power from lack of competition, which means inefficient monopoly pricing. And beyond the econ 101 case, their attempts at bundling mean even more monopoly inefficiency.
I’m not especially clear on what should be done in the academic publishing world as a whole because I haven’t been on the ground in the many attempts to change things. But I think most other options involve costs coming down by more like 90% than like 20%.

Connor_Flexman Nov 15, 2021, 6:19 AM
2 points
in reply to: jimv’s comment on: Sci-Hub sued in India
This is good, thanks!

Connor_Flexman Nov 15, 2021, 6:17 AM
4 points
in reply to: rossry’s comment on: Sci-Hub sued in India
That issue is a good point; I think one variant that gets around it is one focused on pre-prints. As I understand it, some journals allow pre-prints and others don’t. This basically fixes the problem for all fields with a pre-print server.

Connor_Flexman Nov 15, 2021, 6:08 AM
8 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Sci-Hub sued in India
Money just isn’t really a priority/bottleneck on this so nowhere is set up to take donations, except generic Sci-Hub. And that actually might be strategically bad at the moment because Elsevier, like Wormtongue himself, is claiming in the lawsuit that Sci-Hub has commercialized its works through the donations it accepts. Best to have that number stay low.

Sci-Hub sued in India

Connor_FlexmanNov 13, 2021, 11:12 PM

131 points

19 comments7 min readLW link

Connor_Flexman Oct 24, 2021, 1:07 AM
4 points
in reply to: Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
Yeah, ideally would have lampshaded this more. My bad.
The part that gets extra complex is that I personally think ~2/3+ of people who say totalization is fine for them are in fact wrong and are missing out on tons of subtle things that you don’t notice until longer-term. But obviously the mostly likely thing is that I’m wrong about this. Hard to tell either way. I’d like to point this out more somehow so I can find out, but I’d sort of hoped my original comment would make things click for people without further time. I suppose I’ll have to think about how to broach this further.

Connor_Flexman Oct 23, 2021, 10:46 PM
4 points
in reply to: Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
I agree with most of this point. I’ve added an ETA to the original to reflect this. My quibble (that I think is actually important) is that I think it should be less of a tradeoff and more of an {each person does the thing that is right for them}.

Connor_Flexman Oct 23, 2021, 10:42 PM
14 points
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
(I would not take this modus tollens, I don’t think the “community” is even close to fundamentally bad, I just think some serious reforms are in order for some of the culture that we let younger people build here.)

Connor_Flexman Oct 23, 2021, 10:16 PM
20 points
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
But the “community” should not be totalizing.
(Also, I think rationality should still be less totalizing than many people take it to be, because a lot of people replace common sense with rationality. Instead one should totalize themselves very slowly, over years, watching for all sorts of mis-steps and mistakes, and merge their past life with their new life. Sure, rationality will eventually pervade your thinking, but that doesn’t mean at age 22 you throw out all of society’s wisdom and roll your own.)

Connor_Flexman Oct 23, 2021, 10:09 AM
2 points
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Choice Writings of Dominic Cummings
Ah yeah, I should have thought more about what you meant there. Sorry. I’m still not sure I agree though—I feel like the public can be convinced of all sorts of things.
I do think growth may end up being decent evidence. I guess I’m trying to point at why I might be so agnostic without going through a 10-paragraph essay explicitly stating a bunch of scenarios.
So for example, I think people are fairly unconcerned about whether they have a 20% versus a 30% GDP growth over the next 15 years, but rightly concerned about whether there’s then a pandemic that kills a bunch of people and curtails quality of life drastically (just outside the bounds of our growth measurement, arguendo). So, especially as the world gets more and more crazy and plausibly near end-game, I’m willing to trade off increasingly more GDP growth for other things like liberties, nimble government, less-partisan politics, literal political experimentation, etc, that increase quality of life and general or political sanity and decrease likelihood of disasters. I could imagine a world where those things also cashed out immediately in enough economic growth to pay for themselves, but I could also imagine a world where there were ways to get some of these that required real economic sacrifices.

Connor_Flexman Oct 23, 2021, 9:45 AM
42 points
on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
I want to bring up a concept I found very useful for thinking about how to become less susceptible to these sorts of things.
(NB that while I don’t agree with much of the criticism here, I do think “the community” does modestly increase psychosis risk, and the Ziz and Vassar bubbles do so to extraordinary degrees. I also think there’s a bunch of low-hanging fruit here, so I’d like us to take this seriously and get psychosis risk lower than baseline.)
(ETA because people bring this up in the comments: law of equal and opposite advice applies. Many people seem to not have the problems that I’ve seen many other people really struggle with. That’s fine. Also I state these strongly—if you took all this advice strongly, you would swing way too far in the opposite direction. I do not anticipate anyone will do that but other people seem to be concerned about it so I will note that here. Please adjust the tone and strength-of-claim until it feels right to you, unless you are young and new to the “community” and then take it more strongly than feels right to you.)
Anyways, the concept: I heard the word “totalizing” on Twitter at some point (h/t to somebody). It now seems fundamental to my understanding of these dynamics. “Totalizing” was used in the sense of a “totalizing ideology”. This may just be a subculture term without a realer definition, but it means something like “an ideology that claims to affect/define meaning for all parts of your life, rather than just some”—and implicitly also that this ideology has a major effect and causes some behaviors at odds with default behavior.
This definition heavily overlaps with the stuff people typically associate with cults. For example, discouraging contact with family/outside, or having a whole lot hanging on whether the leaders approve of you. Both of these clearly affect how much you can have going on in your “outside” life.
Note that obviously totalization is on an axis. It’s not just about time spent on an ideology, but how much mental space that ideology takes up.
I think some of the biggest negative influences on me in the rationality community also had the trait of pushing towards totalization, though were unalike in many other ways. One was ideological and peer pressure to turn socializing/parties/entertainment into networking/learning, which meant that part of my life also could become about the ideology. Another was the idea of turning my thoughts/thinking/being into more fodder to think about thinking processes and self-improve, which cannibalized more of my default state.
I think engaging with new, more totalizing versions of the ideology or culture is a major way that people get more psychotic. Consider the maximum-entropy model of psychosis, so named because you aren’t specifying any of the neural or psychological mechanisms, you’re taking strictly what you can verify and being maximally agnostic about it. In this model, you might define psychosis as when “thought gets too far away from normal, and your new mental state is devoid of many of the guardrails/protections/negative-feedback-loops/sanity-checks that your normal mental states have.” (This model gels nicely with the fact that psychosis can be treated so well via drinking water, doing dishes, not thinking for awhile, tranquilizers, socializing, etc. (h/t anon).) In this max-ent model of psychosis, it is pretty obvious how totalization leads to psychosis. Changing more state, reducing more guardrails, rolling your own psychological protections that are guaranteed to have flaws, and cutting out all the normal stuff in your life that resets state. (Changing a bunch of psychological stuff at once is generally a terrible idea for the same reason, though that’s a general psychosis tip rather than a totalization-related one.)
I still don’t have a concise or great theoretical explanation for why totalization seems so predictive of ideological damage. I have a lot of reasons for why it seems clearly bad regarding your belief-structure, and some other reasons why it may just be strongly correlated with overreach in ways that aren’t perfectly causal. But without getting into precisely why, I think it’s an important lens to view the rationalist “community” in.
So I think one of the main things I want to see less of in the rationalist/EA “communities” is totalization.
This has a billion object-level points, most of which will be left as an exercise to the reader:
- Don’t proselytize EA to high schoolers. Don’t proselytize other crazy ideologies without guardrails to young people. Only do that after your ideology has proven to make a healthy community with normal levels of burnout/psychosis. I think we can get there in a few years, but I don’t think we’re there yet. It just actually takes time to evolve the right memes, unfortunately.
- To repeat the perennial criticism… it makes sense that the rationality community ends up pretty insular, but it seems good for loads of reasons to have more outside contact and ties. I think at the very least, encouraging people to hire outside the community and do hobbies outside the community are good starting points.
- I’ve long felt that at parties and social events (in the Bay Area anyways) less time should be spent on model-building and networking and learning, and more time should be spent on anything else. Spending your time networking or learning at parties is fine if those are pretty different than your normal life, but we don’t really have that luxury.
- Someone recently tried to tell me they wanted to put all their charitable money into AI safety specifically, because it was their comparative advantage. I disagree with this even on a personal basis with small amounts. Making donations to other causes helps you take them seriously, in the way that trading with real-but-trivial amounts of money instead of paper trading moves you strongly from Far Mode into Near Mode. I think paying 10% overhead of charitable money to lower-EV causes is going to be much better for AI safety in the long-run due to seriousness-in-exploration, AND I shouldn’t even have to justify it as such—I should be able to say something like “it’s just unvirtuous to put all eggs in one basket, don’t do it”. I think the old arguments about obviously putting all your money into the highest-EV charity at a given time are similarly wrong.
- I love that Lightcone has a bunch of books outside the standard rationalist literature, about Jobs, Bezos, LKY, etc etc.
- In general, I don’t like when people try to re-write social mechanisms (I’m fine with tinkering, small experiments, etc). This feels to me like one of the fastest ways to de-stabilize people, as well as the dumbest Chesterton’s fence to take down because of how socializing is in the wheelhouse of cultural gradient descent and not at all remotely in the wheelhouse of theorizing.
- I’m much more wary of psychological theorizing, x-rationality, etc due to basically the exact points in the bullet above—your mind is in the wheelhouse of gradient descent, not guided theorizing. I walk this one—I quit my last project in part because of this. Other forms of tinkering-style psychological experimentation or growth are likely more ok. But even “lots of debugging” seems bad here, basically because it gives you too much episteme of how your brain works and not enough techne or metis to balance it out. You end up subtly or not-subtly pushing in all sorts of directions that don’t work, and it causes problems. I think the single biggest improvement to debugging (both for ROI and for health) is if there was a culture of often saying “this one’s hopeless, leave it be” much earlier and explicitly, or saying “yeah almost all of this is effectively-unchangeable”. Going multiple levels down the tree to solve a bug is going too far. It’s too easy to get totalized by the bug-fixing spirit if you regard everything as mutable.
- As dumb as jobs are, I’m much more pro-job than I used to be for a bunch of reasons. The core reasons are obv not because of psychosis, but other facets of totalization-escape seems like a major deal.
- As dumb as regular schedules, are, ditto. Having things that you repeatedly have to succeed in doing leaves you genuinely much less room for going psychotic. Being nocturnal and such are also offenders in this category.
- I’d like to see Bay Area rationalist culture put some emphasis on real holidays rather than only rolling their own. E.g. Solstice instead of Christmas seems fine, but also we should have a lot of emphasis on Christmas too? I had a housemate who ran amazing Easter celebrations in Event Horizon that were extremely positive, and I loved that they captured the real spirit of Easter rather than trying to inject the spirit of Rationality into the corpse of Easter to create some animated zombie holiday. In this vein I also love Petrov Day but slightly worry that we focus much less on July 4th or Thanksgiving or other holidays that are more shared with others. I guess maybe I should just be glad we haven’t rationalized those...
- Co-dependency and totalizing relationships seem relevant here although not much new to say.
Anna’s crusade for hobbies over the last several years has seemed extremely useful on this topic directly and indirectly.
I got one comment on a draft of this about how someone basically still endorsed years later their totalization after their CFAR workshop. I think this is sort of fine—very excitable and [other characterizations] people can easily become fairly totalized when entering a new world. However, I still think that a culture which totalized them somewhat less would have been better.
Also, lots of people totalize themselves—I was one of those people who got very excited about rationality and wanted to push it to new heights and such, unendorsed by anyone in the “community” (and even disendorsed). So this isn’t a question of “leadership” of some kind asking too much from people (except Vassar)—it’s more a question of building a healthy culture. Let us not confuse blame with seeking to become better.