Dreaded_Anomaly

Karma: 2,180

Dreaded_Anomaly 3 Sep 2023 0:23 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Economics of the Asteroid Deflection Problem (Dominant Assurance Contracts)
Is there a way to do this without needing to secure collateral for the refund, using some stable investment vehicle like a CD? “The earlier you pledge, the bigger refund you get if the contract isn’t fully funded” might help avoid the “waiting until the last moment” issue, but maybe there’s some perverse incentive or other blocker.

I’m also very curious about how this method could solve issues with funding of scientific research. The lack of market pricing for research is a major impediment to allocating public funds effectively. But what prediction market can accurately estimate the price of something that might not pay off for 100 years?

Dreaded_Anomaly 31 Jul 2021 16:57 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Dreaded_Anomaly’s comment on: Covid 7/29: You Play to Win the Game
The Hill has published some more information:

The state health department identified 469 COVID-19 cases among Massachusetts residents who went to Provincetown, a popular vacation destination in Barnstable County, in the month of July, including 346 fully vaccinated people.

Some 127 COVID-19 samples from the fully vaccinated, including recipients of all three U.S.-authorized vaccines, showed a similar viral load to the samples from the 84 unvaccinated people.

The report noted that microbiological studies are needed to confirm that similarity in the viral load to determine whether fully vaccinated people can transmit the virus.

I still have the impression that this data could be systematically biased: it makes sense that the viral load would be high among identified cases, but randomized testing of the broader population is needed to understand the base rates.

Dreaded_Anomaly 30 Jul 2021 23:17 UTC
4 points
on: Covid 7/29: You Play to Win the Game
The CDC’s claim that vaccinated people have similar viral loads from Delta as unvaccinated people is now spreading far and wide on social media. The Washington Post obtained their internal slide deck here, with the unpublished data supporting this claim on slide 17.

Does anyone understand how to square this with various other studies from the past few months with more positive results for vaccine efficacy, serum neutralization, etc.? Or even better, does anyone have the actual source for this data? To me, this claim seems too extreme to be likely, but even my many PhD scientist friends mostly seem to be accepting this completely uncritically.

Dreaded_Anomaly 17 Sep 2020 2:53 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: The Wiki is Dead, Long Live the Wiki! [help wanted]
“Twiki” is already the name of a wiki-related product (https://twiki.org/), so that might be confusing.

Dreaded_Anomaly 1 Jan 2017 7:55 UTC
0 points
on: Rationality Quotes September–December 2016

There was a correlation if she plotted the high-traffic times to the incidents … No. This was wrong. She was looking at it the wrong way. They didn’t just need to look at when things had happened. They needed to look at all the times Medina had seen similar conditions—high traffic, large-mass ships, mistuned reactors—and nothing had gone wrong.

– Naomi Nagata in “Babylon’s Ashes” by James S. A. Corey

Dreaded_Anomaly 25 Jun 2015 18:30 UTC
19 points
on: The Brain as a Universal Learning Machine
A few brief supplements to your introduction:

The source of the generated image is no longer mysterious: Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks

But though the above is quite fascinating and impressive, we should also keep in mind the bizarre false positives that a person can generate: Images that fool computer vision raise security concerns

Dreaded_Anomaly 12 Apr 2015 16:07 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Algon’s comment on: I’d like advice from LW regarding migraines
Zvi is their CEO.

Dreaded_Anomaly 12 Apr 2015 5:40 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: I’d like advice from LW regarding migraines
I find their site on the wayback machine as recently as March 22, 2015. OP could also try PMing user:Zvi.

Dreaded_Anomaly 5 Apr 2015 3:40 UTC
2 points
on: LW’s take on nutrition?
My view of nutrition is basically option 2. “Nutrition science” as it exists today seems to be primarily an attempt to study subtle, complex effects using small, poorly-controlled samples. There are basic facts about nutrients that are fairly well supported, but I have never become convinced of the superiority of any “diet” based on the supposed evidence for it.

Dreaded_Anomaly 14 Mar 2015 14:51 UTC
2 points
in reply to: TrE’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 121
That order is based on the increasing size of the sets of possible values, of course.

Dreaded_Anomaly 1 Mar 2015 6:13 UTC
5 points
on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 113
Here is a suggestion that I haven’t seen yet. I don’t think it constitutes a full plan by itself, but it fits the form of an AI box experiment with Harry as the AI.

Harry and Voldemort’s discussion about testing his horcrux 2.0 spell by offering immortality to one of his friends (read: minions, in his case) revealed a weakness, that Voldemort is heavily biased against certain ways of thinking. Harry should remind him of this in the context of the Patronus 2.0 spell. The fact that Harry was able to discover a new (and incredibly powerful, as we have seen) form of magic simply by having the right mindset may indicate that certain mindsets are key to discovering deeper secrets of magic as a whole. (I’m envisioning here, as may or may not be canon, magic as an API for tapping into the power of Atlantis.) Voldemort has a known interest in the deeper secrets of magic, and for this reason he should keep Harry alive, or risk losing access to mindsets he currently can’t fathom.

Dreaded_Anomaly 27 Feb 2015 2:57 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: [LINK] The Wrong Objections to the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
Even Kepler’s theory expressed as his three separate laws is much simpler than a theory with dozens of epicycle.

Dreaded_Anomaly 26 Feb 2015 6:17 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: [LINK] The Wrong Objections to the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
Kepler’s heliocentric theory is a direct result of Newtonian mechanics and gravitation, equations which can be encoded very simply and require few parameters to achieve accurate predictions for the planetary orbits. Copernicus’ theory improved over Ptolemy’s geocentric theory by using the same basic model for all the planetary orbits (instead of a different model for each) and naturally handling the appearance of retrograde motion. However, it still required numerous epicycles in order to make accurate predictions, because Copernicus constrained the theory to use only perfect circular motion. Allowing elliptical motion would have made the basic model slightly more complex, but would have drastically reduced the amount of necessary parameters and corrections. That’s exactly the tradeoff described by MML.

Dreaded_Anomaly 24 Feb 2015 4:56 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: [LINK] The Wrong Objections to the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
The linked Wikipedia page provides a succinct derivation from Shannon and Bayes’ Theorem.

Dreaded_Anomaly 21 Feb 2015 4:03 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Gavin’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 108
You can change the comment sort to “new” instead of “top”, below the tags at the bottom of the original post.

Dreaded_Anomaly 21 Feb 2015 3:50 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: [LINK] The Wrong Objections to the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
Among theories that explain the evidence equally well, those with fewer postulates are more probable. This is a strict conclusion of information theory. Further, we can trade explanatory power for theoretical complexity in a well-defined way: minimum message length. Occam’s Razor is not just “a convenient heuristic.”

Dreaded_Anomaly 13 Dec 2014 20:56 UTC
1 point
on: Good things to have learned....
I wish I had taken more statistics courses. I learned the basics and have picked up a fair amount of the advanced stuff through self-study during graduate school, but I didn’t realize during college how useful it would be.

I wish more people would take more computer science courses. Intro to Comp Sci is usually too basic to be useful. Data structures, algorithms, numerical/scientific computing are all useful in a large variety of careers.

Dreaded_Anomaly 23 Nov 2014 21:05 UTC
14 points
on: November 2014 Monthly Bragging Thread
I defended my dissertation earlier this month, earning a PhD in experimental high energy physics in just over 3 years. In January, I’ll be moving on to a postdoctoral research position at a national laboratory.

Dreaded_Anomaly 26 Oct 2014 3:07 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: October 2014 Media Thread
I’ve been catching up on Person of Interest. The first season is kind of a slog, but it gets much better after that. The most recent episode explicitly discusses AI Friendliness and AI-box problems.

Dreaded_Anomaly 25 Oct 2014 20:19 UTC
1 point
in reply to: lmm’s comment on: Non-standard politics

the provisions of that Texas bill that was notably filibustered sounded reasonable to me

Political and social context is important for the Texas bill and others like it. The relentlessly pursued goal of the “pro-life” movement is to restrict access to abortion. Requiring hospital admitting privileges sounds reasonable on its face, but the stigma faced by abortion providers makes it an onerous burden that is more likely to shut down clinics than to improve the safety of their operations.

I think we should be less squeamish about acknowledging when we’re trading off on human lives, particularly those of children.

Alongside bills such as the above, the “pro-life” movement is making every attempt to restrict access to long-lasting low-failure-rate birth control, which is one of the best ways to reduce abortions. They often base their arguments on erroneous claims that such birth control is abortifacient. Even if those claims were supported by evidence, the idea that a single-celled zygote is morally equivalent to (or even anywhere in the neighborhood of) a thinking, self-aware person is absurd.

“Human lives” is an artificial category. What counts as a human life? Why should we care about those things?

I think we should attempt to reduce (and ideally eliminate) these natural miscarriages through funding of medical research, the same way we do e.g. cot death.

There are two important points about these natural miscarriages. The first is the sheer number of them, which certainly would merit medical research and treatment if one considers fetuses morally equivalent or close to persons. The second, however, is not addressed by that proposal. In most cases of early natural miscarriage, the woman did not realize that she was pregnant. Does medical treatment for a fetus warrant, e.g., surveillance of women to ensure that no pregnancies go unnoticed?