DirectedEvolution

Karma: 11,152

Pandemic Prediction Checklist: H5N1

Pandemic Prediction Checklist: Monkeypox

Correlation may imply some sort of causal link.

For guessing its direction, simple models help you think.

Controlled experiments, if they are well beyond the brink

Of .05 significance will make your unknowns shrink.

Replications show there’s something new under the sun.

Did one cause the other? Did the other cause the one?

Are they both controlled by what has already begun?

Or was it their coincidence that caused it to be done?

DirectedEvolution Mar 21, 2025, 6:01 AM
15 points
14
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform
“I’m skeptical of this one because female partners are typically notoriously high maintenance in money, attention, and emotional labor.”

Some people enjoy attending to their partner and find meaning in emotional labor. Housing’s a lot more expensive than gifts and dates. My partner and I go ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ on expenses and chores. Some people like having long-term relationships with emotional depth. You might want to try exploring out of your bubble, especially if you life in SF, and see what some normal people (ie non-rationalists) in long term relationships have to say about it.

DirectedEvolution Mar 19, 2025, 6:21 PM
8 points
2
on: OpenAI #11: America Action Plan
I cancelled my OpenAI subscription due to this article and I let them know that’s the reason why in their cancellation survey.

DirectedEvolution Mar 18, 2025, 7:07 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Gurkenglas’s comment on: Metacognition Broke My Nail-Biting Habit
Unfortunately the level of physical restraint I’d need to stop biting is too costly to be worth it to me.

DirectedEvolution Mar 17, 2025, 3:18 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Gurkenglas’s comment on: Metacognition Broke My Nail-Biting Habit
It actually did contain capsaicin IIRC. Sort of a bitter spicy mix. The other issue is it gets on things you touch, including food if you’re preparing or eating it by hand.

DirectedEvolution Mar 17, 2025, 3:16 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Gurkenglas’s comment on: Metacognition Broke My Nail-Biting Habit
I’ve tried that, but it’s not enough to stop me. Makes my mouth taste disgusting for no benefit.

DirectedEvolution Mar 10, 2025, 5:38 AM
5 points
0
in reply to: ozziegooen’s comment on: Marcello’s Shortform
They are

DirectedEvolution Mar 2, 2025, 5:07 PM
17 points
0
in reply to: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comment on: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s Shortform
My partner has ADHD. She and I talk about it often because I don’t, and understanding and coordinating with each other takes a lot of work.

Her environment is a strong influence on what tasks she considers and chooses. If she notices a weed in the garden walking from the car to the front door, she can get caught up for hours weeding before she makes it into the house. If she’s in her home office trying to work from home and notices something to tidy, same thing.

All the tasks her environment suggests to her seem important and urgent, because she’s not comparing them to some larger list of potential priorities that apply to different contexts—she’s always working on the top priority strictly with reference to the context she’s in at the moment.
She is much better than me at accomplishing tasks that her environment naturally suggests to her—cooking (inspired by recipes she finds on social media), cleaning, shopping, gardening, socializing, and making social plans in response to texts and notifications on her phone.
I am much better than her at constructing an organized list of global priorities and working through them systematically. However, I find it very difficult to be opportunistic, and I can be inflexible and distracted from the moment because I’m always thinking of the one main task I want to focus on.
I don’t think explore/exploit is quite the right frame in our relationship. I’m much more capable of “exploring” topics that require understanding complex abstract interconnections because I can force myself to keep coming back to them over and over again, whatever they are, in any environment, until I’ve understood them. By contrast she’s more capable of “exploiting” unpredictable opportunities as they arise. But the opportunities she and I are exposed to are constrained by our patterns of attention.

DirectedEvolution Feb 13, 2025, 7:25 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: Gunnar_Zarncke’s Shortform
There is trust in the practical abilities. Right now it is low, but that will only go up.
Part of the learning curve for using existing AI is calibrating trust and verifying answers, conditional on use case. A hallmark of inexperienced AI users is taking its replies at face value, without checking.
I do expect that over time, AI will become more trustworthy for daily users. But that is compatible with the trust users place in it decreasing as they familiarize themselves with the technology and learn its limitations.

DirectedEvolution Feb 3, 2025, 7:21 AM
17 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Viliam’s Shortform
I’ve participated in several alternative communities over the course of my life, and all became mired in scandal. The first was my college, where tolerance of hard drug use by the administration resulted in multiple OD deaths in my time there. The second was in my 20s in an intentional living and festival culture, when a major community figure was accused by multiple women of drugging and raping them while unconscious. The third was the EA and rationality community, which of course has had one scandal after another for years.
My model is that drugs, extreme ideas, mental illness, economic precarity, alternative cultures and institutions, power differences, and violent behavior are mutually reinforcing. Rationalists may drastically underestimate how intensely the recruitment funnel they’ve created selects for interest by disturbed people. Or the extent to which features correlated with the movement, like lifestyle experimentation, alternative spirituality or drug use, may be the central attractions for some, using rationality as a pretext. It’s the opposite of evaporative cooling—it’s condensation of crazy.
My belief is that to counteract this, it’s necessary to promote some level of conformism and convention to the standards and norms of society at large. Think of academia in STEM. Yes, the people and jobs are unusual. But the requirement for participants to repeatedly integrate into new departments at new universities repeatedly and work with many collaborators and a constant churn of new students from around the world makes for a melting pot culture where condensation of crazy is mitigated on a per capita basis.

In short, it seems to me that it’s in the very nature of niche movements and alternative communities to generate scandal for systematic sociological reasons. There is probably no way to retain the niche alt community structure without the scandal. Individuals will have to choose whether or not they prioritize a low frequency of scandal, or having the community exist in its present form.

A question I ask when sizing up a community is “do these people seem likely to be much more scandal-prone than the average church, sports team or workplace?” I also ask this for people I am considering getting to know. I go with my intuition and choose how to engage accordingly.

DirectedEvolution Jan 25, 2025, 2:50 AM
2 points
−2
on: Mechanisms too simple for humans to design
We can do the same with living organisms. The human genome contains about 6.2 billion nucleotides. Since there are 4 nucleotides (A, T, G, C), we need two bits for each of them, and since there are 8 bits in a byte, that gives us around 1.55 GB of data.
In other words, all the information that controls the shape of your face, your bones, your organs and every single enzyme inside them – all of that takes less storage space than Microsoft Word™.
There are two ways to see this is incorrect.
1. DNA’s ability to structure an organism is mediated through its chemical mileau. It is densely, dynamically regulated through a complex and dense mesh of proteins and regulatory RNA and small signaling molecules at every timepoint in every organism throughout the life cycle. Disruption of that chemical mileau renders the organism nonviable. This is a separate issue from the fact that evolution overwhelmingly operates on DNA sequence.
2. The DNA in a particular organism/cell is one point in a very long series of complex inheretance chains going back 4.5 billion years. I’m comfortable rounding off the maximum complexity of the soma to the maximum possible complexity of the complete set of ancestral DNA sequences. But we can go further by noticing that an individual’s DNA sequence is not just the combination of their direct ancestors—the entire ancestral lineage at every step is sampled from a distribution of possible genomes that is produced from mechanisms impacting reproduction.
In a more mathematical sense, while it’s true that, conditional on a specific non-stochastic function, the number of values in the output set is less than or equal to the number of values in the input set, if the function can vary freely then there is no such constraint.
The soma might be viewed as a stochastic function mapping DNA inputs to phenotypic outputs. The stochastic aspect gives a much larger number of theoretically possible outputs from the same input set. And the fact that the ‘function’ (soma) itself varies from organism to organism increases the number of phenotypes that can be generated from a given amount of DNA still further.
All these arguments also apply to technology. MS Word ‘co-evolved’ with Windows, with programming languages, with hardware, and this context must be taken into account when thinking about how complex a machine is.

DirectedEvolution Jan 22, 2025, 2:59 AM
4 points
0
on: AllAmericanBreakfast’s Shortform
The CDC and other Federal agencies are not reporting updates. “It was not clear from the guidance given by the new administration whether the directive will affect more urgent communications, such as foodborne disease outbreaks, drug approvals and new bird flu cases.”

DirectedEvolution Jan 17, 2025, 4:10 AM
3 points
0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
I drink about 400mg of caffeine daily through coffee and Coke Zero. It helps me process complex ideas quickly, consider alternatives, and lifts my mood.
Without it, I get frustrated when I can’t follow arguments or understand ideas, often rejecting them or settling for “good enough.” Caffeine gives me the clarity and energy to stay open to new ideas and better solutions.

DirectedEvolution Jan 15, 2025, 3:15 AM
1 point
−3
in reply to: nim’s comment on: Don’t Legalize Drugs
Stable is not a virtue, nor is our equilibrium well-tolerated. The problems it causes in terms of health, cost and homelessness are central political issues and have been for a long time.

I also have no idea why you assume I’m “ignoring” these “lessons” you’re handwaving at. It’s a pretty annoying rhetorical move.

DirectedEvolution Jan 14, 2025, 5:58 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: nim’s comment on: Don’t Legalize Drugs
and yet it’s legally just as intolerable for an intoxicated person to harm others as it would be for a sober person to take the same actions
Even America hasn’t been able to solve drug abuse with negative consequences. My hope is mainly on GLP-1 agonists (or other treatments) proving super-effective against chemical dependence, and increasing their supply and quality over time.

DirectedEvolution Jan 8, 2025, 6:22 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Nathan Young’s Shortform
I recommend making the title time-specific, since all the predictions you’re basing your estimate on are as well.

DirectedEvolution Jan 8, 2025, 7:06 AM
29 points
24
on: OpenAI #10: Reflections
I think it’s wise to assume Sam’s public projection of short timelines does not reflect private evidence or careful calibration. He’s a known deceiver, with exquisite political instincts, eloquent, and it’s his job to be bullish and keep the money and hype flowing and the talent incoming. One’s analysis of his words should begin with “what reaction is he trying to elicit from people like me, and how is he doing it?”

DirectedEvolution Jan 6, 2025, 5:51 AM
6 points
0
on: Estimating the benefits of a new flu drug (BXM)
If you assume BXM costs $180 and grants 25 additional days of life expectancy for a flu-exposed 85 year old man from the quantified example, then that suggests it would be valued at $2628/year in this population. Probably one year with comorbidities at 85 is not one QALY, but still I have to imagine that’s drastically above the threshold for US medicine, albeit nowhere close to the cost-effectiveness of the most effective global health charities from a utilitarian perspective.

DirectedEvolution Jan 6, 2025, 5:41 AM
6 points
0
on: Estimating the benefits of a new flu drug (BXM)
I’m going to post additional information not explored in the model, but interesting to me as future directions for research, in comments.
Drug resistance can be studied in viral kinetics/dynamics studies. These studies focus on two aspects of viral biology:
- Mutations vs. drug resistance
- Mutations vs. replication efficiency
One in vitro study found some baloxavir-resistant strains are generally less efficient at replication than wild type, though that’s not a universal for all contexts/viruses/cell types/metrics. Also, these studies typically control the genome of the virus, whereas in the wild, viruses can develop compensating mutations for the decreased fitness induced by the resistance-conferring mutation.
The mutations linked to resistance are currently rare (<1%) in flu patients. This study measured resistance in terms of cell death +/- baloxavir and viral yield +/- baloxavir at different concentrations of drug and different strain mixtures. In some cases, only small fractions of resistant strains were needed to reduce susceptibility. I’m curious if this may be because the resistant proteins are being “shared” among the population of resistant and non-resistant viruses in the cell, but don’t have enough knowledge of influenza biology to know if that’s plausible.
There are a whole bunch of interesting looking in vitro studies on various drugs/strains/cell types.

Estimating the benefits of a new flu drug (BXM)

DirectedEvolutionJan 6, 2025, 4:31 AM

41 points

2 comments3 min readLW link

DirectedEvolution Jan 4, 2025, 6:16 PM
8 points
0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: RohanS’s Shortform
In the pre LLM era, I’d have assumed that an AI that can solve 2% of arbitrary FrontierMath problems could consistently win/tie at tic tac toe. Knowing this isn’t the case is interesting. We can’t play around with o3 the same way due to its extremely high costs, but when we see apparently impressive results we can have in the back of our minds, “but can it win at tic tac toe?”

DirectedEvolution

Es­ti­mat­ing the benefits of a new flu drug (BXM)

Estimating the benefits of a new flu drug (BXM)