digital_carver

Karma: 231

digital_carver 7 Dec 2024 13:53 UTC
3 points
0
on: (Salt) Water Gargling as an Antiviral
The conclusion only mentions effectiveness relative to other liquids, but the actual conclusion seems buried in the text: “Water 3.6x/day led to a 30% reduction in illness (implicitly defined as lacking throat symptoms)”.

The text also says

It found a 30% drop in illness when gargling increased in frequency from 1 time per day to 3.6 times, which is fantastic.

at the beginning though, which at first I interpreted as gargling 3.6 times leads to 30% more drop in illness compared to gargling once a day, but it seems like that may have been just unclear wording?

This is a good season to get this info, thanks for the research and the article.

digital_carver 22 Dec 2022 13:47 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: digital_carver’s comment on: Not Getting Hacked
Turns out it can also happen for sending your child’s medical pictures to a doctor (and also send the cops after you).

Or for storing “educational content on Palestine”. Unverified story, and there’s a few more such stories and links at [1] and [2],

(I’m not including cases where it was a developer account—i.e. an account used to publish apps—that was banned.)

The core issue seems to have two sides:
1. Google’s automated systems are sometimes too eager about banning accounts, if you in any way happen to stand out as a (false) positive case
2. Google’s script-following customer support seems pretty bad at then dealing with these cases, giving no information, and worse, taking in no information provided to them, and in general the best customer support avenue seems to be Hacker News or some other news outlet.
  This is the visible tip of the iceberg where the accounts do (generally) get reinstated, but we don’t know how large the invisible part of the iceberg is, and what the chances of getting your account back are if you aren’t lucky enough to be in the visible part.

digital_carver 22 Dec 2022 13:36 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Not Getting Hacked

Note that Google can terminate your account with no recourse (it has no customer support to speak of) due to completely unrelated reasons

Another example of this that comes to mind is when fans of a YouTube streamer got their entire Google accounts banned for posting too many emojis (as votes, at the streamer’s behest) in YouTube chat.

digital_carver 4 Nov 2022 11:59 UTC
1 point
0
on: K-types vs T-types — what priors do you have?
The classification is too abstract for me to figure out to what degree I agree with it, and where I fall. The table of examples is also of largely abstract things, and also full of confounding variables (i.e. other reasons to choose one choice over another). Could you take a specific concrete theory, and work through what version of it a K-type and a T-type person would prefer?

digital_carver 28 Sep 2021 19:46 UTC
2 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: [Book Review] “The Alignment Problem” by Brian Christian
I believe there’s a conflict-vs-mistake thing going on here. I saw this as a specific case where the probabilities don’t line up the way your comment assumes they do. You seem to be from the beginning assuming I’m opposing an entire worldview and seeing it as some attack.

where a Twitter screenshot calling out Google is incontrovertible ‘disinterested’ evidence never to be questioned

Behold, the Straw Man! Today for his trick, he turns “However small X’s level of evidence is, Y has even weaker evidence” into “X is incontrovertible evidence never to be questioned”.

I considered the original tweet, the fact that Google did not refute it, and the claim that Google blocked ape-related tags from Photos for years afterwards (with its own attached probability), and updated my inner measure of probability of this being true. And I find that the statement from the ex-Googler provides even weaker evidence to update based on. Nothing is “never to be questioned” here.

any objection is instead required to be multiple independent third-party studies?

Again a thing I didn’t say, and you keep repeating.

They were not disinterested in the least! They were specifically ‘calling out’ and shaming Google for it

A “claim from a disinterested party” means someone previously disinterested, someone where our prior assumptions can be close to assuming they are disinterested. A police officer is considered disinterested in a case if their family and friends are not involved in the case, and so can be assigned the case. It makes no sense to say “they’ve been assigned to the case now, so they’re not a disinterested party”!

They were specifically ‘calling out’ and shaming Google for it and it worked brilliantly in earning them huge fake internet points.

This is the original tweet pointing out the issue. To me it just looks like a user casually pointing out a problem with a tool they use. Not everyone is obsessed all the time with culture wars and internet points.

(Someone who left Google and is mentioning it in an aside years later which no one noticed, that’s much closer to disinterested.)

Oh by the way, I found evidence that this author tweeted this seals claim back at the time as part of the Twitter thread about this. Still without any links or images, but that helped update my probabilities a little bit (as I had believed that part of the problem might be that it came two years later, as mentioned before). I wish that’s what this conversation had consisted of, actual evidence to try to arrive at the truth, instead of straw men and outright false claims.

The last paragraph has little to do with the claims here, unless you’re dumping an entire opposing worldview on me, and arguing against that imaginary person. For the record, I am much closer to your worldview regarding these issues and have noticed most of the things you mentioned. It’s just that in this instance even with that background there isn’t good enough evidence to believe the media suppressed some narrative.

My original comment has served its purpose to provide additional context for those who want it, and I don’t think further discussion with you here will be productive. Thanks for all the fish.

digital_carver 27 Sep 2021 8:49 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: [Book Review] “The Alignment Problem” by Brian Christian

I’m writing this rather nitpicky comment because this is the top comment replying with rather strong wording about sourcing and studies and double standards for reporting...

This is an unnecessarily snarky addition to the comment that’s disappointing to see (and doesn’t even make sense, since mine is neither a top comment, nor does it mention studies). In case you interpreted the “especially if I’d seen it was from gwern” in a negative way, I meant it as a factual statement that I saw you as a person with high respect and trust and hence assigned high prior confidence to things from you.

So, how many third parties reported about the classification and how trustworthy were they?

The original post was by a disinterested third party sharing a screenshot. However small the level of evidence provided by that is, an offhand statement by someone literally involved in the project and with no attached evidence at all is obviously much weaker.

What should we make of an ecosystem which tells us on a literally daily to weekly basis (google the term) about the gorillas, but never, ever tells you about the seals (I only learned about that one because I was reading the Google expert’s post for other reasons)? What should we infer about the epistemics and justifications of the various experts and reporting here?

Let’s simulate two worlds:

In world (A), Google’s PR team were so incompetent that they did not mention this “white people misidentified as seals” at the time, even to say “our system sometimes misidentifies people as animals, for eg. <photo of white people with seal tag>, and we are improving the system”—which would have softened the PR blow significantly. Users see white people tagged as animals, but they never ever share it; or they do, but no one bothers to report it, not even a tabloid with space to fill and low standards, not even contrarian media that carries “All Lives Matter” articles and would love to use any “attack on whiteness”; and the screenshot doesn’t go viral either (despite “bots are funnily dumb” being a favourite meme category).

In world (B), the “white people tagged as seals” happens either only in obviously-distorted or blurry photos, or only in an internal test system that never even got out of Google, or in some other not-usable-for-PR way. Journalists do not report on it because they don’t see it. A Googler writes a non-official Medium article that’s not focused on this, two years after the fact, and mentions it in a couple of sentences offhandedly. Perhaps one or two journalists happen to read it for other reasons, just like you, but it’s mentioned as a past bug that’s likely fixed, and there’s no supporting evidence, nothing to show their editor as a potential article, so they move on.

With the evidence available to us, something similar to world (B) seems much more likely than world (A).

digital_carver 25 Sep 2021 22:50 UTC
−3 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: [Book Review] “The Alignment Problem” by Brian Christian
For anyone not clicking to read the article: its author “was technical leader for Google’s social efforts (including photos)” at the time, and doesn’t cite any public sources for the information. So we should at least consider how that’s going to colour their interpretation/representation of the information.

They don’t mention how often black people were classified as gorillas, and how that compared to white people being classified as dogs or seals. It could be that for every thousand cases of the former, there was one of the latter, or it may be one for one. My sibling comment says “The dataset had a good mix of races in it” (which I take to mean there was some reasonable proportional representation of races) - the article doesn’t claim that. It says “the training data included a wide range of people of all races and colors”, contrasting that with HP webcams where “the training data for “faces” had been composed exclusively of white people”—so it clears the bar of not being exclusively white, but we don’t know by how much. In fact, the article goes on to say (due to photography practices) “our standards for what constitute “good images” still overwhelmingly favor white faces rather than black ones.”

I’m writing this rather nitpicky comment because this is the top comment with rather strong wording (“no journalists bothered reporting this, but that system classified white people as ‘dogs’ and ‘seals’”), that on another day I might have just taken on faith (especially if I’d seen it was from gwern, which I didn’t at first) - I would have assumed the link contained a study, or at least images of results pages, and contained solid additional information about these results from a third party.

digital_carver 13 Sep 2021 19:53 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Morpheus’s comment on: The Best Software For Every Need
I used the other Anki add-on for Incremental reading enough to be convinced of IR’s potential, but unfortunately that addon has enough issues that it’s not really usable for me. I’ve had the one you linked to installed for a while (based on many recommendations on Anki website and reddit), but I never figured out how the UI actually works. For now, SuperMemo definitely seems to have a lead when it comes to IR.

digital_carver 29 Apr 2021 19:43 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Dorikka’s comment on: Better air is the easiest way not to die
As far as I know, it’s just a random person on the Internet saying things that seem well thought-out and with enough research to at least serve as a good starting point. There’s also a Hacker News page with critical discussion and other semi-related information, for those interested.

Better air is the easiest way not to die

digital_carver28 Apr 2021 10:24 UTC

23 points

9 comments1 min readLW link

(dynomight.net)

digital_carver 25 Apr 2021 22:50 UTC
1 point
in reply to: methree’s comment on: Estimating COVID cases & deaths in India over the coming months
The policy briefing file is pretty useful, a useful summary and then a bunch of neat graphs. (I’ve been jealous of Zvi’s posts on Covid-19 in the US for quite some while, and this is probably the closest we’ll get for India.) They also include comparison with other model projections from different groups at the end, which gives some other possible projections to look at.

digital_carver 25 Jan 2021 7:37 UTC
15 points
on: Leaky Delegation: You are not a Commodity

“knowledge compilation” or “production compilation,” which serves only to specialize knowledge: turning a general operation like “recall the next digit of my phone number and then say it” into a specialized one like “say ‘seven.’”

This is a great concept to add to my mental vocabulary, thanks for mentioning it.

(Going off-topic from the main point of the post here.) It helps me understand, for eg., the pattern of success and failure in teaching my dad how to use a smartphone. Originally, I kept trying to directly transfer the general knowledge I had, about what to expect from mobile UIs, the dark patterns websites and apps use, etc., and found very little of it stuck. It turns out that, if I instead give him the compiled knowledge, specific to each instance—which intuitively feels like a bad way to teach things—he’s able to reverse engineer a “good enough” part of the general knowledge from that, given enough examples. (Insert comparison to the success of just-give-it-lots-of-samples ML over symbolic top-down AI here.)

This concept of general uncompiled knowledge vs specific compiled action is a good tool for thinking about pedagogy and learning, applicable in many ways.

digital_carver 16 Jan 2021 15:14 UTC
1 point
on: [U.S. specific] PPP: free money for self-employed & orgs (time-sensitive)
I didn’t read the post, but thank you for saying ‘[U.S. specific]’ right in the title. I wish this was a norm more widely across the Internet.

digital_carver 3 Jan 2021 11:38 UTC
3 points
on: Alike minds think great
Related: Career advice from Scott Adams (Dilbert’s creator) suggests becoming “very good (top 25%) at two or more things.” (He even goes on to suggest: “At least one of the skills in your mixture should involve communication, either written or verbal. ”)

Being a translator is often a natural outcome of this; when you have two or more mental spaces to pick ideas and metaphors from, it becomes easier to describe complex things in one field without resorting to jargon, using the language of a different field. Trying to be a translator can also be useful to clarify your own understanding, for this reason—you can’t hide behind jargon or “common knowledge” beliefs any more, and so have to go through, clarify, and perhaps reconstruct your mental models for what you’re trying to translate.

digital_carver 30 Dec 2020 18:32 UTC
15 points
0
on: Give it a google
An addendum to this, perhaps as a next level, is to give it a non-google search.
- DuckDuckGo helps me avoid the SEO-driven spammy results more easily than with Google, which is particularly apparent when searching about products, or terms that could be construed as product-related. My hypothesis is that the SEOptimizers have learnt the specifics of what Google’s algorithm looks for and so have refined techniques to get their less-deserving clients rise to the top, and (thankfully) those techniques don’t work with whatever alternate algorithms DDG uses. (To be clear, it’s not a strict “DDG is always better than Google” thing, rather that they’re surprisingly good at complementing each other, one being good when the other gives weak results.)
- Million short is useful when I’m searching for something that’s had a lot of media attention, but I want to avoid the mainstream media pieces on it. It excludes the top 100/1000/.../million websites on the Internet (as ranked by Alexa) from its results, which is sometimes exactly what you want.
For the sake of completion, some other alternate search engines are Metager , Qwant , and Mojeek (all of which claim privacy as their primary benefit). And I love me a bit of wiby when I’m feeling nostalgic about the old, simpler, 90s Internet of plain personal pages, and want to experience some of that again.

digital_carver 23 Dec 2020 7:32 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Jacob Falkovich’s comment on: How Lesswrong helped me make $25K: A rational pricing strategy

But job seekers have a lot of consultants/agencies/headhunters they can turn to and I’d imagine your price mostly depends on the competition

This is true, but also often overrated, especially when it comes to individual customers. If you’re selling to businesses, do consider that they’d be willing to shop around and optimize to some extent, so differences from your competitors matter a lot. Individual customers however really hate having to search around, compare options, and risk choice overload; if they’ve found OP as a provider of this service, they’d really prefer to be able to choose them. At this point, OP is not in equal footing with the rest of the competition, and thinking so would lose them income.

I run a similar kind of business to OP, and what I’ve learnt over the years is that unless your prices are outrageously higher (as in an order of magnitude or more), pricing higher than your competition doesn’t significantly affect your business, and often results in higher earnings (i.e. what you lose in raw customer numbers, you more than earn back with the larger individual revenues).

digital_carver 9 Dec 2020 17:27 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Alex_Altair’s comment on: Logistics for the 2020 online Secular Solstice celebration

but we will have no resource margin for properly testing anything but Chrome. (I also sort of expect that the kind of person who uses an uncommon browser will be the kind of person to try it anyway.)

I live in such a tech (especially FOSS) bubble that I feel sad faced with the reality that anything other than Chrome counts as an “uncommon browser”.

(Although, checking the stats, it looks like even on desktop, Chrome’s browser share is only around 65%, which isn’t as monopolistically high as I expected.)

(PS: this isn’t meant to be a criticism of your decision at all, to be clear.)

digital_carver 8 Dec 2020 20:27 UTC
5 points
on: The AI Safety Game

Then, you try to think of how you could save the world, given the stuff written on the cards.

Just to make it explicit, does “save the world” mean things like solve world hunger, create a true utopia, take us on an accelerated path to post-scarcity state, etc.?

digital_carver 27 Nov 2020 18:13 UTC
8 points
1
in reply to: alkjash’s comment on: Pain is not the unit of Effort

If anything they found escape and respite in working on their education, and having hope and a direction to work towards increased their subjective well-being.

I think there’s a useful distinction to be made here between general mental state and specific moment-to-moment emotional experiences. Working on something, that gives hope and respite from a feeling of helplessness, increases overall well-being in the general sense, but doesn’t fully make up for the difficulties and annoyances that crop up while doing the work day after day after day, so in the moment it’s still pain that dominates their experience. (So maybe here is part of the answer to applying this advice in these situations—if what you’re working on improves general life satisfaction, even if it’s painful at the moment, then that’s an indication that you’re doing it right. Although, caveats: (A) it’s often difficult in these situations to tell if your life satisfaction is improving or not, both because −49 to −45 isn’t as easily felt as 2 to 6, and your life is unstable and fluctuating enough that there isn’t much of a reliable base state to compare to, and (B) this is more an indication of whether you’ve made the right strategic decisions—right course or career path that you feel good about - whereas I think the original point of the advice, and its maximum effectiveness IMO, is regarding tactical low-level decisions.)

I agree with your final paragraph entirely. Pain isn’t a reliable unit of effort beyond a point, even in these contexts. Over time, it starts growing super-linearly for linear effort.

digital_carver 26 Nov 2020 15:00 UTC
3 points
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: What Would Advanced Social Technology Look Like?
Since we can’t vote on individual suggestions, I’ll mention that my vote is mainly for the “Information Indexing” idea.

Even just within science, I believe there are large advances to be made if cross-field knowledge was made more accessible. As science gets more specialised, it becomes harder to make use of useful findings from areas of research outside your own, or even to realize they exist in the first place.

And in reality the use goes far beyond scientific research, this can make a big difference to businesses, to working professionals, and in people’s personal lives too.

digital_carver

Bet­ter air is the eas­iest way not to die

Better air is the easiest way not to die