But it’s possible we could even isolate there in the in-law unit.
I thought this was the pretty clear cut answer before you wrote it. Totally endorse. Wear masks on the flight if possible. Ask your parents to stock up or start sending prep packages there (Amazon, Costco delivers)
The first question for me is are people starving in Wuhan due to the outbreak?
Answer is no, as of now, though food situation is uncomfortable. (my wife has relatives there she’s in contact with). Trucks come to apartment complexes and people pick up.
I’m not sure the analogy translates well to US though. For better or worse us people are less organized. Also large % population live in suburbs where such deliveries are not feasible.
OTOH we have an excellent general delivery system in Amazon, UPS etc.
I’m slightly worried.
There’s some but not a lot of interest in this topic on LW; I have a mailing list with primarily rationalist types on the topic; PM me email address to be added
Data always says something unless it’s randomly generated. At the very least Chinese data provides lower bounds on some things. You can get somewhat better estimates if you model their incentives (though the lying will greatly increase the uncertainty and complexity of any model)
There’s the opposite effect: the early diagnosed cases tend to concentrate on the more obviously serious ones (more likely to die).
https://twitter.com/robertwiblin/status/1222577306515976192
It is also good to invest in improving ones’ immune system by health food, vitamins, light therapy, as it is our best protection of the virus. Evacuation into a cold county house would weaken the immune system.
How much can one “improve” one’s immune system by these methods in a short time? Is there any data to back this up?
In general agree with the rest. In worst-case scenario ability to self-isolate for a while (“bug in” in prepper lingo) seems worthwhile.
What do you use to listen to pdfs?
On the one hand this post does a great job of connecting to previous work, leaving breadcrumbs and shortening the inferential distance. On the other hand what is this at the end?
But one thing I’m pretty sure won’t help much is clever logic puzzles about implausibly sophisticated Nazis.
I have no idea what this is talking about.
[edit] It also seems like this is the sort of thing that marketing pretty strongly encourages misrepresentation of. “All children are above-average,” in that the restaurant wants to present itself as serving healthy, cheap, tasty food, while also paying its employees well and having good returns for its investors. But several of those variables are in direct tension with each other, and there’s not great language for speaking publicly about the tradeoffs you’re making.
Couple of reasons spring to mind:
Marketing leverages the Halo Effect
Not emphasizing being above average on a particular dimension is a chink in the armor against competitors (who can establish beach head by claiming to be superior in that dimension)
The way I understand the objection it that YC promotes “building great products”, which attracts (a lot of) certain kinds of founders, but in fact YC is optimizing for something else (primarily described in Black Swan Farming, confirmed by other sources). I believe they are quite value-additive to the companies they accept, but attract more founders than if they were “honest about their optimization function”, where some founders could have been better off engaging with other VCs on possibly better terms.
>> Fiddly puttering with something that fascinates you is the source of most genuine productivity. (Anything from hardware tinkering, to messing about with cost spreadsheets until you find an efficiency, to writing poetry until it “comes out right”.) Sometimes the best work of this kind doesn’t look grandiose or prestigious at the time you’re doing it.
Hmm, I use to spend quite a bit of time fiddling with assembly language implementations of encryption code to try to squeeze out a few more percent of speed. Pretty sure that is not as productive as more “grandiose” or “prestigious” activities like thinking about philosophy or AI safety, at least for me… I think overall I’m more afraid that someone who could be doing productive “grandiose” work chooses not to in favor of “fiddly puttering”, than the reverse.
I suspect this might be a subtler point?
http://paulgraham.com/genius.html
suggests really valuable contributions are more bottlenecked on obsession rather than being good at directing attention in a “valuable” direction
For example, for the very ambitious, the bus ticket theory suggests that the way to do great work is to relax a little. Instead of gritting your teeth and diligently pursuing what all your peers agree is the most promising line of research, maybe you should try doing something just for fun. And if you’re stuck, that may be the vector along which to break out.
I think in part these could be “lessons relevant to Sarah”, a sort of a philosophical therapy that can’t be completely taken out of context. Which is why some of these might seem of low relevance or obvious.
Fiddly puttering with something that fascinates you is the source of most genuine productivity. (Anything from hardware tinkering, to messing about with cost spreadsheets until you find an efficiency, to writing poetry until it “comes out right”.) Sometimes the best work of this kind doesn’t look grandiose or prestigious at the time you’re doing it.
http://paulgraham.com/genius.html seems to be promoting a similar idea
I’ll claim LW priority for pointing to the idea (but not to elaborating it in a post) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/isSMDR8rMr5pTzJK5/example-of-poor-decision-making-under-pressure-from-game?commentId=YzvDcA357NboxD2fE :)
Ross https://web.stanford.edu/~shachter/ uses something like this to score answers to (appropriately) Decision Analysis homework questions. (Don’t remember the exact rule, but the intent was the same)
What does it imply for things like AI governance and global coordination on x-risks?
I’ve read the article a while ago, and vaguely concluded there should be some implications here (but largely uncertain about the direction or magnitude, being a non-expert). Interested to hear what people think (esp. people who concentrate on policy)
How about we let go of success, but keep doing challenging stuff anyway, just for the fun of it?
This sort of feels like Feynman’s attitude, despite him being extremely successful.
Also notable: NVIDIA trained a half-order-of-magnitude larger model https://nv-adlr.github.io/MegatronLM?utm_campaign=NLP%20News&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter
Seems way off from the actual release; any post-mortem?
Potential method of coping: disinfecting room. Unpack the stuff in protective gear, then after unpacked blast it with UV light?