philh

• philhNov 24, 2024, 3:17 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Yanling Guo’s comment on: Eco­nomics101 pre­dicted the failure of spe­cial card pay­ments for re­fugees, 3 months later whole of Ger­many wants to adopt it

  I don’t know anything about the card. I haven’t re-read the post, but I think the point I was making was “you haven’t successfully argued that this is good cost-benefit”, not “I claim that this is bad cost-benefit”. Another possibility is that I was just pointing out that the specific quoted paragraph had an implied bad argument, but I didn’t think it said much about the post overall.

• philhNov 20, 2024, 10:12 PM

  4 points

  0

  on: Book re­view: the Iliad

  My guess: [signalling] is why some people read the Iliad, but it’s not the main thing that makes it a classic.

  Incidentally, there was one reddit comment that pushed me slightly in the direction of “yep, it’s just signalling”.

  This was obviously not the intended point of that comment. But (ignoring how they misunderstood my own writing), the user

  • Quotes multiple high status people talking about the Iliad;

  • Tantalizingly hints that they are widely-read enough to be able to talk in detail about the Iliad and the old testament, and compare translations;

  • Says approximately nothing about the Iliad;

  • And says nothing at all about why they think the Iliad is good, and nor do roughly ³⁄₄ of the people they quote. (Frye explains why it’s important, but that’s different. The last 6 lines of Keats talk about how Keats reacted to it, but that doesn’t say what’s good about it. Borges says a particular line is more beautiful than some other line (I think both lines are fine). Only Santayana tells me what he thinks is good about the Iliad.)

  So like, you’re trying to convince me the Iliad isn’t just signalling by quoting Keats, saying essentially “I’d heard the Iliad was so good, but it took me forever to track down a copy^[1]. When I did? Blew my mind, man. Blew my mind.” Nonspecific praise feels like signalling, appeal to authority feels like signalling, and the authority giving nospecific praise? This just really solidly rings my signalling bells, you know?

  1. ^

     I misunderstood Keats when I first replied to the comment. I’d assumed that when he said he “heard Chapman speak out loud and bold”, he had, you know, heard someone named Chapman speak, perhaps loudly and boldly. Apparently it was what is called a “metaphor”, and he had actually just read Chapman’s translation.

• philhNov 9, 2024, 1:05 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: philh’s comment on: philh’s Shortform

  Complex Systems (31 Oct 2024): From molecule to medicine, with Ross Rheingans-Yoo

  When you first do human studies with a new drug, there’s something like a ²⁄₃ chance it’ll make it to the second round of studies. Then something like half of those make it to the next round; and there’s a point where you talk to the FDA and say “we’re planning to do this study” and they say “cool, if you do that and get these results you’ll probably be approved” and then in that case there’s like an 85% chance you’ll be approved; and I guess at least one other filter I’m forgetting. Overall something like 10-15% of drugs that start on this pipeline get approved, typically taking at least 7 years.

  A drug that gets approved needs to make about $2 billion, to make up for the costs of all those trials plus the trials for the drugs that didn’t get approved. And it has about 10 years to do that before patent protections expire, because you filed the patent before doing the first human studies and you only get 20 years from that point.

  Typically what happens is someone forms a company for a specific drug, and while it’s in fairly early trials the company gets bought by a big pharma company. The trials themselves are done by companies that specialize in running clinical trials.

  Ross says Thalidomide was sort of the middle of a story. The story started with Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which he wrote as a “look at the horrible conditions meat packers have to endure” but what the public took from it is “excuse me, there are human fingers in my sausages?” So after that was the pure food and drug act which said that anything had to be just the thing it said it was.

  But then a drug came which was exactly what it said it was, and that thing was bad for people. So after that you needed to do studies to show safety, but they were less rigorous than they are now?

  And then thalidomide happened, which was fine for most people but caused birth defects when taken by a pregnant person. When it came up for approval, the beurocrat looking at it happened to have previously looked at rabbits and seen that drug uptake and metabolization could be different in pregnant rabbits, making something otherwise non-toxic become toxic. And so she said the company needed data about safety in pregnant people, even though this was a non-standard requirement at the time. The company tried to avoid that, she insisted, and it never got approved in the US. But standards still got stricter.

  (It did get approved in Europe. It’s relevant that Germany didn’t like tracking birth defects due to previous history, so the problems weren’t noticed as early as they might have been.)

  One of the times when regulations got stricter, part of the story is that at the same time as public outrage, there also happened to be a bill in progress for reasons of punishing pharma for something something, so that’s the bill that got through.

  At some point you started to get patient advocacy groups, saying “we are dying while you hold this drug up”, and the FDA would pay attention to that. And then the pharma companies would get involved in those groups, and now it’s at the point where you kinda need one of those or the FDA will be like “why would we prioritize you?”

  There are drugs that the FDA wants to encourage but which aren’t profitable, e.g. helping with diseases common in the third world and rare in the US. One motivation is if you make one they’ll give you a priority review voucher, good to help another drug of yours get approved faster. These vouchers are transferrable, and the market price is… I think $100k or $200k?

  With covid vaccines, the government said “if you produce a thing that satisfies these criteria, we will buy X amount of it for sure”. That took some uncertainty out of the process and helped things get made.

  Sometimes a drug will succeed in trials but not get pushed forward for various reasons, sometimes just falling through cracks. One drug this happened with was a covid treatment, which seemed to reduce hospitalizations by 70% in vaccinated people. When it was in development the FDA said it was unlikely to get emergency use authorization, and the company dropped it.

  (Related: VaccinateCA got a lot of funding for a while, and then after the funders themselves got vaccinated, it got less funding.)

  Later the company was going bankrupt, and they sold off their assets, which included “drugs that seemed promising but we never went anywhere with”, including this one. Ross was involved in some other company buying up that drug.

  You can do trials for covid much cheaper than for cancer drugs. For cancer you’ll often have a list of a smallish number of people and try to find the specific individuals who give you the best chance of a statistically significant result based on comorbidities and such, and have someone specifically approach the people you want. For covid the cheap thing to do is: everyone who comes to your clinic with a cough gets the drug and gets a covid test. Later you find out if they had covid and (thanks to a phone call) what happened to their symptoms. And you can do this sort of thing somewhere like Brazil, instead of doing it in the most prestigious hospital (where there are a bunch of other studies going on distracting people). But it’s kind of a weird thing to do, and if trials fail your investors might be like “why didn’t you do the normal thing?”

• philhOct 14, 2024, 8:31 PM

  2 points

  0

  on: A ba­sic sys­tems ar­chi­tec­ture for AI agents that do au­tonomous research

  Though this particular story for weight exfiltration also seems pretty easy to prevent with standard computer security: there’s no reason for the inference servers to have the permission to create outgoing network connections.

  But it might be convenient to have that setting configured through some file stored in Github, which the execution server has access to.

• philhSep 27, 2024, 7:02 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Martin Randall’s comment on: [Com­pleted] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario

  Yeah, if that was the only consideration I think I would have created the market myself.

• philhSep 26, 2024, 2:57 PM

  19 points

  8

  in reply to: aphyer’s comment on: [Com­pleted] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario

  Launching nukes is one thing, but downvoting posts that don’t deserve it? I’m not sure I want to retaliate that strongly.

• philhSep 26, 2024, 10:17 AM

  27 points

  12

  on: [Com­pleted] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario

  I looked for a manifold market on whether anyone gets nuked, and considered making one when I didn’t find it. But:

  • If the implied probability is high, generals might be more likely to push the button. So someone who wants someone to get nuked can buy YES.

  • If the implied probability is low, generals can get mana by buying YES and pushing the button. I… don’t think any of the generals will be very motivated by that? But not great.

  So I decided not to.

• philhAug 28, 2024, 12:18 PM

  3 points

  1

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: I would have shit in that alley, too

  No they’re not interchangeable. They are all designed with each other in mind, along the spectrum, to maximize profits under constraints, and the reality of rivalrousness is one reason to not simply try to run at 100% capacity every instant.

  I can’t tell what this paragraph is responding to. What are “they”?

  You explained they popped up from the ground. Those are just about the most excludable toilets in existence!

  Okay I do feel a bit silly for missing this… but I also still maintain that “allows everyone or no one to use” is a stretch when it comes to excludability. (Like, if the reason we’re talking about it is “can the free market provide this service at a profit”, then we care about “can the provider limit access to people who are paying for it”. If they can’t do that, do we care that they can turn the service off during the day and on at night?)

  Overall it still seems like you want to use words in a way that I think is unhelpful.

• philhAug 22, 2024, 5:34 PM

  4 points

  2

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: I would have shit in that alley, too

  Idk, I think my reaction here is that you’re defining terms far more broadly than is actually going to be helpful in practice. Like, excludability and rivalry are spectrums in multiple dimensions, and if we’re going to treat them as binaries then sure, we could say anything with a hint of them counts in the “yes” bin, but… I think for most purposes,

  • “occasionally, someone else arrives at the parking lot at the same time as me, and then I have to spend a minute or so waiting for the pay-and-display meter”

  is closer to

  • “other people using the parking lot doesn’t affect me”

  than it is to

  • “when I get to the parking lot there are often no spaces at all”

  I wouldn’t even say that: bathrooms are highly rivalrous and this is why they need to be so overbuilt in terms of capacity. While working at a cinema, did you never notice the lines for the womens’ bathroom vs the mens’ bathroom once a big movie let out? And that like 99% of the time the bathrooms were completely empty?

  My memory is we didn’t often have that problem, but it was over ten years ago so dunno.

  I’d say part of why they’re (generally in my experience) low-rivalrous is because they’re overbuilt. They (generally in my experience) have enough capacity that people typically don’t have to wait, and when they do have to wait they don’t have to wait long. There are exceptions (during the interval at a theatre), but it still seems to me that most bathrooms (as they actually exist, and not hypothetical other bathrooms that had been built with less capacity) are low-rivalrous.

  None of your examples are a counterexample. All of them are excludable, and you explain how and that the operators choose not to.

  I’m willing to concede on the ones that could be pay gated but aren’t, though I still think “how easy is it to install a pay gate” matters.

  But did you miss my example of the pop-up urinals? I did not explain how those are excludable, and I maintain that they’re not.

• philhAug 18, 2024, 9:09 PM

  4 points

  2

  on: philh’s Shortform

  Thing I’ve been wrong about for a long time: I remembered that the rocket equation “is exponential”, but I thought it was exponential in dry mass. It’s not, it’s linear in dry mass and exponential in Δv.

  This explains a lot of times where I’ve been reading SF and was mildly surprised at how cavalier people seemed to be about payload, like allowing astronauts to have personal items.

• philhAug 18, 2024, 6:35 PM

  4 points

  2

  in reply to: dr_s’s comment on: Lon­don Ra­tion­al­ish meetup—Lin­coln’s Inn Fields

  Sorry, I didn’t see this notification until after—did you find us?

• philhAug 16, 2024, 11:24 AM

  3 points

  0

  on: Eco­nomics101 pre­dicted the failure of spe­cial card pay­ments for re­fugees, 3 months later whole of Ger­many wants to adopt it

  I agree that econ 101 models are sometimes incorrect or inapplicable. But

  I don’t know how much that additional cost is, but seemingly less than the benefit, because three months later, the whole of Germany wants to introduce this card. The introduction has to be delayed by some legal issues, and then a few counties want to introduce it independently. So popular is this special card!

  The argument here seems to be that the card must satisfy a cost-benefit analysis or it wouldn’t be so popular, and I don’t buy that either.

• philhAug 15, 2024, 7:54 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Smaug123’s comment on: Or­gani­sa­tion for Pro­gram Equil­ibrium read­ing group

  Ah, I can sometimes make fridays but not tomorrow. Hope it goes well.

Lon­don Ra­tion­al­ish meetup—Lin­coln’s Inn Fields

• philhAug 3, 2024, 10:53 AM

  2 points

  0

  on: Mul­ti­plex Gene Edit­ing: Where Are We Now?

  they turn a C/​G base pair to an A/​T, or vice versa.

  Can they also turn it into a G/​C or a T/​A? I wasn’t sure if this was an example or a “this is the only edit they do”. Or I might just be misunderstanding and this question is wrong.

• philhJul 23, 2024, 8:38 AM

  4 points

  2

  in reply to: rossry’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

  I think Ben’s proposal is: between rounds, it takes a while to split the whole deck into suits, all hearts in one pile and all spades in another and so on. Instead you can just pick out four hearts, and four spades, and so on, and remove 0/​2/​2/​4 cards from those piles, and shuffle the rest back into the deck. But no matter how you shuffle, I don’t think you can do that without leaking information.

• philhJul 22, 2024, 1:32 PM

  8 points

  0

  in reply to: rsaarelm’s comment on: Sci-Fi books micro-reviews

  The Gap Cycle by Stephen R. Donaldson

  I think I’ve read this twice, in my early teens and early twenties, and loved it both times. But I’m now 34 and can’t talk about it in depth. I think past-me especially liked the grimness and was impressed at how characters seemed to be doing things for internally motivated reasons. (IIRC Donaldson calls this giving characters “dignity”. I feel like since then I’ve picked up another term for it that’s temporarily slipped my mind.)

  I still think A Dark and Hungry God Arises and This Day All Gods Die are excellent book titles.

  A caveat is that back then I also loved Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books, and I think that by my mid-twenties I enjoyed them but not so much. So plausibly I’d like the Gap Cycle less now than then too? But I want to re-read.

  Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

  I once saw a conversation that went something like: “I don’t find writing quality in sci-fi that important.” /​ “You clearly haven’t read Too Like the Lightning”.

  I wasn’t sure if the second person meant TLTL’s writing is good or bad. Having read TLTL, both interpretations seemed plausible. (They meant good.)

  I found it very difficult to get through this book, except that the last few chapters were kind of gripping. That was enough to get me to read the next one, which was hard to get through again. Ultimately I read the whole series, and I’m not sure how much I enjoyed the process of reading it. But they’re some of my favorite books to have read, and I can imagine myself re-reading them.

  Crystal trilogy by Max Harms

  I enjoyed this but don’t have much to say. As an AI safety parable it seemed plausible enough; I hadn’t previously seen aliens like that; I occasionally thought some of the writing was amateurish in a way I couldn’t put my finger on, but that wasn’t a big deal.

• philhJul 22, 2024, 11:45 AM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Ben Millwood’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

  just make 4 piles of 4 cards from each suit and remove from those

  I don’t think you can do this because at least one person will see which cards are in those piles, and then seeing those cards in game will give them more info than they’re supposed to have. E.g. if they see 9h in one of the piles and then 9h in game, they know hearts isn’t the 8-card suit.

  (The rules as written are unclear on this. But I assume that you’re meant to remove cards at random from the suits, rather than having e.g. A-8 in one suit, A-Q in one, and A-10 in the other two. If you did that then getting dealt the Q or J would be a dead giveaway.)

• philhJul 11, 2024, 6:53 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Ex­er­cise: Plan­mak­ing, Sur­prise An­ti­ci­pa­tion, and “Baba is You”

  I think Causality would be good for this. Levels have their full state visible from the start, and there’s no randomness. There’s a relatively small number of mechanics to learn, though I worry that some of them (particularly around details of movement, like “what will an astronaut do when they can’t move forward any more?”) might be “there are multiple equally good guesses here” which seems suboptimal.

  Actually, there’s one detail of state that I’m not sure is visible, in some levels:

  When you come out of a portal, which way do you face? I think there’s probably a consistent rule for this but I’m not sure, I could believe that in some levels you just have to try it to see.

• philhJul 9, 2024, 12:08 PM

  3 points

  1

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: I would have shit in that alley, too

  they are by definition rivalrous (“the consumption of a good or service by one person diminishes the ability of another person to consume the same good or service”), as only one person in a stall at a time, and the timeframe doesn’t matter to this point.

  Why does timeframe not matter? If there’s a pay-and-display parking lot, with enough spaces for everyone, but only one ticket machine, would you say this is rivalrous because only one person can be using the ticket machine at once?

  Bathrooms aren’t zero rivalrous, but they seem fairly low-rivalrous to me. (There are some people for whom bathroom use is more urgent, making bathrooms more rivalrous, e.g. pregnant people and those with certain disabilities. My understanding is these people sometimes get access to extra bathrooms that the rest of us don’t.)

  (As for dirtiness, all I can say is that the public bathrooms I’ve used tend to be somewhere between “just fine” and “unpleasant but bearable”. I did once have to clean shit from the toilet walls in the cinema where I used to work, but I believe it’s literally once in my life I’ve encountered that. Obviously people will have very different experiences here.)

  they are extremely excludable: “Excludability refers to the characteristic of a good or service that allows its provider to prevent some people from using it.”

  Depends on details. London has some street urinals that afaict pop up at night, they have no locks or even walls, they’re nonexcludable. Some are “open to everyone the attendant decides to let in”, and some are “open to everyone with a credit card”, and these seem just straightforwardly excludable. Other bathrooms can be locked but have no attendant and no means of accepting payment, so they’re either “open to everyone” or “closed to everyone”, and calling that “excludable” feels like a stretch to me. I suppose you could say that you could install a pay gate so it’s “excludable but currently choosing not to exclude people”, but then it depends how easy it is to install one of them.