syllogism

• syllogism 28 Mar 2020 13:07 UTC

  1 point

  on: Coron­avirus Open Thread

  Does COVID-19 have a long “incubation period” because we don’t have any immunity to it?

  This is a “makes sense to me” idea I merely thought of, and I have 0 medical expertise. So this is probably dumb, but now that I’ve thought of it I keep wondering whether it’s true.

  My thinking is that the early symptom onset we feel when we get a cold or flu is partly down to our immune system responding, which causes inflammation etc. With the novel coronavirus, the immune system isn’t responding early on, and the infection itself will be in the slow ramp stage of its exponential growth, so the infection is already well established by the time you start to feel it.

• syllogism 24 Mar 2020 22:34 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Jay Molstad’s comment on: Break­ing quaran­tine is neg­li­gence. Why are democ­ra­cies act­ing like we can only ask nicely?

  I mean...The same way we always do? It depends on whether the risks are reasonably forseeable. We know that if you go about your business as normal while infectious with the coronavirus, you might infect 4 people on average. If we take a lowish infection fatality rate and say that 0.1% of infected people die, then you have a something like a 0.4% chance of directly causing someone’s death.

  How bad is a 0.4% chance? Should the law tolerate people putting others in danger, at about that level? If you could load up a 200-barrel revolver, would it be okay to put one bullet in, spin and fire?

  Here’s one way to think about it: if you were to act such that you introduced a 0.4% chance of someone else dying every day for a year, there’s a 23% chance someone would eventually die. So I would say, no, this is not a level of danger we can accept people to impose on non-consenting strangers.

  In practice the way that I think the law normally works is, if your actions show a disregard for the welfare of others and someone is in fact harmed, then you can be held culpable. So if you go outside, someone catches coronavirus and dies, then you can be held responsible. By my crude calculation, there’s about a ¹⁄₂₀₀ chance of that happening. I don’t think most people would break quarantine if they knew there was a ¹⁄₂₀₀ chance of someone dying and them going to prison. I think just explaining that the law was seeing it that way makes them take the risks seriously, while as it currently stands, lots of people think it sounds like bullshit.

• syllogism 24 Mar 2020 22:17 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Jay Molstad’s comment on: Break­ing quaran­tine is neg­li­gence. Why are democ­ra­cies act­ing like we can only ask nicely?

  But quarantine isn’t a punishment, nobody’s saying the person being quarantined has done anything wrong. It’s just that you’ve suddenly become extremely dangerous, and that means you have to change your behaviour quite extremely to avoid harming other people. That’s very inconvenient, sure, but nobody’s convenience gives them the right to put others in harms way.

  I’m not a lawyer but criminal negligence is definitely a thing:

  • https://​​en.wikipedia.org/​​wiki/​​Criminal_negligence

  • https://​​en.wikipedia.org/​​wiki/​​Recklessness_(law)

  • https://​​en.wikipedia.org/​​wiki/​​Endangerment

• syllogism 24 Mar 2020 19:26 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: Break­ing quaran­tine is neg­li­gence. Why are democ­ra­cies act­ing like we can only ask nicely?

  You can extend the same negligence standard further, though. You can tell people: check your temperature in the morning, and if you have a fever you are lethally dangerous. That facts of the situation we’re in are such that, going outside with a fever really does burden other people with unconscionable risk. But we’ve left it for individual people to deduce that, which means we can’t enforce that as a standard.

  A law could be passed that said, if prosecution can show beyond a reasonable doubt that you either knew or did not care to know whether you had a fever when you left the house, and you left the house anyway, that that is sufficient to show a negligent disregard for others’ safety. You’d then have to make an affirmative defence for why it was not actually negligent (for instance, you could argue that you’d have coronavirus before, or that it was reasonable to believe you could not encounter anyone).

  A lot of drug laws work on sort of analogous logic: they define “trafficable quantities”, such that showing you possess some amount of a drug is sufficient to argue you’re distributing that drug, and then it’s up to you to mount an affirmative defence that moves the balance of probability back in your favour. You’re still assumed innocent of the fact of possession—but the law is allowed to encode some inferences, once facts are established.

• syllogism 24 Mar 2020 19:17 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Break­ing quaran­tine is neg­li­gence. Why are democ­ra­cies act­ing like we can only ask nicely?

  (Not a lawyer so potentially this isn’t correct, but:) Legally negligence is a bit weird in that it doesn’t really work probabilistically. If you actually cause the harm you suffer the culpability, but otherwise, maybe not. I do find it a bit unsatisfying, but I suppose the advantage is it’s robust to the state being completely wrong about whether something is risky. In practice most people do adjust their behaviour to the potential downside for themselves, preventing the potential downside for others. But it does depend on the individual to make a rational risk calculation.

  The extent of the negligence definitely matters. Not vaccinating your children isn’t on the same planet of externalised risk as going outside with coronavirus. And passive smoking is several orders of magnitude lower externalised risk than failing to vaccinate your children.

  My main point is that the argument needs to be made forcefully that there’s a simple and unexceptional basis for requiring people to comply with quarantine. This isn’t a strange situation where the state must grab additional power. Actually I’ve seen a lot of people say that libertarian theories of justice fail to account for this situation. I’m not a libertarian but I think it’s important that we totally reject that take. That’s not what’s going on at all.

  The situation must not be framed as one exceptional circumstance where the state gets to basically imprison you in order to force you to do it the favour of not walking around. That’s completely not what’s happening. Instead the strange facts of the situation are this: by walking around you might be causing people to die. We must make people understand this strange fact. If you recklessly say “I don’t care I’m walking around anyway”, and someone does in fact die, then you are culpable. For the vast majority of people, this will be enough to make them comply. If you know you’re sick and you know that going outside might send you to prison for the rest of your life, why risk it?

• syllogism 16 Mar 2020 2:09 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: gwillen’s comment on: Coron­avirus Open Thread

  I agree that actually eradicating influenza feels far-fetched. But on the other hand, it’s quite a lot easier to work with than COVID-19. Influenza isn’t nearly as infectious, most people have immunity, and it’s barely transmissible at all when the carrier is asymptomatic.

  Imagine you actually did have the “hazmat curtain” situation. Everyone is asked to take their temperature on the way in, and significant fines (and potential visa cancellations) are imposed if you lie. At first nearly everyone is checked to verify, but this is relaxed to spot-checks as people get used to never breaking the rule. Few enough people are getting sick that when people do report influenza symptoms, they can be tested, and contact tracing can be employed to halt the outbreak and trace it back to how it was introduced.

  If there are no animal reservoirs for the disease, I think that could be viable? It’s expensive, but influenza is a big cost in itself, in lost productivity and other problems.

  The big problem I see for eradicating coronavirus will be in poorer countries—Africa, the middle east, etc. The outbreaks there are still pretty small, but there’s no real resources to address them, so the problem could grow there until it’s really hard to fix.

• syllogism 14 Mar 2020 22:08 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Coron­avirus Open Thread

  Most tests you carry out on anyone else will be negative, so even if you think there’s an 80-90% chance the patient is COVID-19 positive, you still get more information from running those tests than the lower symptomatic people.

  Also, it does change all sorts of decisions. It probably changes what precautions the healthcare workers need to take, and it lets you tell the person’s family to self-isolate. Otherwise the husband is in critical condition, and the wife might be a week behind, so she’s in the waiting room making everyone sick.

• syllogism 14 Mar 2020 21:24 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Coron­avirus Open Thread

  But why can’t we eradicate the virus? Let’s say China shuts down international travel, keeps doing what they’re doing, and then slowly eases back up in some area, letting the people in that city comingle and go back to work, but still restricting travel in and out. Let’s say they get that city back running, with no coronavirus cases after a month.

  At the same time...Won’t they also have basically eradicated other influenza there? Even if not entirely, there should be much less cold and flu, right? So as soon as coronavirus creeps back in, it should be much easier to contain.

  I guess my thinking here is, if coronavirus is much more virulent than the flu, and this type of containment works to almost eliminate the coronavirus, could China...actually eradicate the flu, at the same time? If not, why not?

  The problem comes in from other countries. If China goes to all this effort and the US, Europe, UK etc don’t, do we would end up with this weird hazmat curtain? Asian countries would join China in eradicating the disease, and Australia and New Zealand would probably join them.

• syllogism 12 Jan 2018 21:13 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: EnterUsername’s comment on: [link]: Neu­ral pro­gram syn­the­sis is a dan­ger­ous tech­nol­ogy (im­mi­nently, be­cause malware)

  I don’t think I meant to imply that—could you point out where I seem to be making that assumption?

  Obviously there are more exploits for a computer running Windows 95 than a carefully firewalled Linux server.

• syllogism 12 Jan 2018 20:15 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: [link]: Neu­ral pro­gram syn­the­sis is a dan­ger­ous tech­nol­ogy (im­mi­nently, be­cause malware)

  Thanks!

  Okay, I’ll paste the content in. I think you’re right—a link post is pretty much strictly worse.

• syllogism 12 Jan 2018 16:21 UTC

  1 point

  on: [link]: Neu­ral pro­gram syn­the­sis is a dan­ger­ous tech­nol­ogy (im­mi­nently, be­cause malware)

  First post on LW2, so apologies if I’ve not kept norms properly—let me know if I should edit.

  I considered doing this as a cross-post but it felt weird without rewriting, as the knowledge assumptions were all wrong—so I decided to just link.

• syllogism 16 Mar 2015 1:47 UTC

  16 points

  on: Effi­cient Open Source

  I don’t think the Hamming advice is so great. It’s akin to asking, “What are the highest salary professions? Why aren’t you entering them?”.

  Academia is a market-place. Everyone wants high research impact, for a given expenditure of time. Some opportunities are higher-value than others, but as those opportunities appear, other researchers are going to identify them too.

  So in academia, as in the economy, it’s better to identify your comparative advantage—both short-term, and long-term. You usually need to publish something quickly, so you need to know what you can do right away. But you also want to plan for the medium and long-term, too. It’s a difficult trade-off.

• syllogism 4 Mar 2014 10:35 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: someonewrongonthenet’s comment on: Learn­ing lan­guages effi­ciently.

  I’m interested in developing better language learning software.

  For the movie case, do you think these would be helpful? Any other ideas?

  • Read in the subtitles file before viewing, so that vocab can be checked and learned via spaced repetition

  • Option to slow down the dialogue, with pitch-shifting to keep it from sounding weird and bassy

• syllogism 3 Feb 2014 9:06 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Luke_A_Somers’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity & Low-IQ People

  You’d go pretty far just telling the audience the character was unintelligent, by giving them unintelligent status markers. Give them a blue-collar career, and very low academic achievement, while also coming from a stable family and average opportunity.

  It’s been a while since I watched it, but do you think Ben Affleck’s character in Good Will Hunting was rational, but of limited intelligence?

  There are scattered examples of this sort of “humble working man, who lives honest and true” throughout fiction.

• syllogism 3 Feb 2014 8:59 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Josh You’s comment on: Arthur Chu: Jeop­ardy! cham­pion through ex­em­plary rationality

  Can’t say I’m impressed with his reasoning there.

  Interesting.

• syllogism 3 Feb 2014 3:09 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: protest_boy’s comment on: Arthur Chu: Jeop­ardy! cham­pion through ex­em­plary rationality

  It doesn’t seem to me that he has that any more than ther Jeopardy! contenders.

• syllogism 4 Jan 2014 4:18 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Anatoly_Vorobey’s comment on: What are you work­ing on? Jan­uary 2014

  In ML, everyone is engaging with the academics, and the academics are doing a great job of making that accessible, e.g. through MOOCs. ML is one of the most popular targets of “ongoing education”, because it’s popped up and it’s a useful feather to have in your cap. It extends the range of programs you can write greatly. Many people realise that, and are doing what it takes to learn. So even if there are some rough spots in the curriculum, the learners are motivated, and the job gets done.

  The cousin of language processing is computer vision. The problem we have as academics is that there is a need to communicate current best-of-breed solutions to software engineers, while we also communicate underlying principles to our students and to each other.

  If you look at nltk, it’s really a tool for teaching our grad students. And yet it’s become a software engineering tool-of-choice, when it should never have been billed as industrial strength at all. Check out the results in my blog post:

  • NLTK POS tagger: 94% accuracy, 236s

  • My tagger: 96.8% accuracy, 12s

  Both are pure Python implementations. I do no special tricks; I just keep things tight and simple, and don’t pay costs from integrating into a large framework.

  The problem is that the NLTK tagger is part of a complicated class hierarchy that includes a dictionary-lookup tagger, etc. These are useful systems to explain the problem to a grad student, but shouldn’t be given to a software engineer who wants to get something done.

  There’s no reason why we can’t have a software package that just gets it done. Which is why I’m writing one :). The key difference is that I’ll be shipping one POS tagger, one parser, etc. The best one! If another algorithm comes out on top, I’ll rip out the old one and put the current best one in.

  That’s the real difference between ML and NLP or computer vision. In NLP, we really really should be telling people, “just use this one”. In ML, we need to describe a toolbox.

• syllogism 2 Jan 2014 17:18 UTC

  23 points

  on: What are you work­ing on? Jan­uary 2014

  I’m currently a post-doc doing language technology/​NLP type stuff. I’m considering quitting soon to work full time on a start-up. I’m working on three things at the moment.

  • The start-up is a language learning web app: http://​​www.cloze.it . What sets it apart from other language-learning software is my knowledge of linguistics, proficiency with text processing, and willingness to code detailed language-specific features. Most tools want to be as language neutral as possible, which limits their scope a lot. So they tend to all have the same set of features, centred around learning basic vocab.

  • Something that’s always bugged me about being an academic is, we’re terrible at communicating to people outside our field. This means that whenever I see a post using an NLP tool, they’re using a crap tool. So I wrote a blog post explaining a simple POS tagger that was better than the stuff in e.g. nltk (nltk is crap): http://​​honnibal.wordpress.com/​​2013/​​09/​​11/​​a-good-part-of-speechpos-tagger-in-about-200-lines-of-python/​​ The POS tagger post has gotten over 15k views (mostly from reddit), so I’m writing a follow up about a concise parser implementation. The parser is 500 lines, including the tagger, and faster and more accurate than the Stanford parser (the Stanford parser is also crap).

  • I’m doing minor revisions for a journal article on parsing conversational speech transcripts, and detecting disfluent words. The system gets good results when run on text transcripts. The goal is to allow speech recognition systems to produce better transcripts, with punctuation added, and stutters etc removed. I’m also working on a follow up paper to that one, with further experiments.

  Overall the research is going well, and I find it very engaging. But I’m at the point where I have to start writing grant applications, and selling software seems like a much better expected-value bet.

• syllogism 18 Nov 2013 17:11 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: jockocampbell’s comment on: The dan­gers of zero and one

  Yeah, I came across that idea in the Jaynes book, and was very impressed.

• syllogism 17 Nov 2013 14:25 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: jockocampbell’s comment on: The dan­gers of zero and one

  Denying that 100% confidence is ever rational seems to be equivalent to denying that logic ever applies to anything.

  It’s just saying that logic is a model that can’t describe anything in the real world fully literally. That doesn’t mean it’s not useful. Abstracting away irrelevant details is bread and butter reductionism.