Elizabeth's Shortform

ooooooh actual Hamming spent 10s of minutes asking people about the most important questions in their field and helping them clarify their own judgment, before asking why they weren't working on this thing they clearly valued and spent time thinking about. That is pretty different from demanding strangers at parties justify why they're not working on your pet cause. 

Abstract issues raised by the Nonlinear accusations and counter-accusations

1. How do you handle the risk of witness tampering, in ways that still let innocent people prove themselves innocent? Letting people cut corners if they claim a risk of tampering sure sets up bad incentives, but it is a real problem the system needs to be able to deal with
2. How do you handle the fact that the process of providing counter-evidence can be hacked, in ways that still let innocent people prove themselves? People can string it out, or bury you in irrelevant data, or provide misleading data that then requires more time to drill into. 
3. How do you handle the risk of true, negative things coming out about the alleged victim? My take is that the first and strongest complaints will come from people who are extra sensitive, fragile, or bad at boundaries regardless of the situation, because duh. If you put two people in the same situation, the more sensitive person will complain more regardless of the situation. That's what sensitive means. 
4. Probably the best thing for the community as a whole is for complete, accurate information to come out about both the victims and the org, but this has h

EA/rationality has this tension between valuing independent thought, and the fact that most original ideas are stupid. But the point of independent thinking isn't necessarily coming up with original conclusions. It's that no one else can convey their models fully so if you want to have a model with fully fleshed-out gears you have to develop it yourself. 

There's a thing in EA where encouraging someone to apply for a job or grant gets coded as "supportive", maybe even a very tiny gift. But that's only true when [chance of getting job/grant] x [value of job/grant over next best alternative] > [cost of applying].

One really clear case was when I was encouraged to apply for a grant my project wasn't a natural fit for,  because "it's quick and there are few applicants".   This seemed safe, since the deadline was in a few hours. But in those few hours the number of applications skyrocketed- I want to say 5x but my memory is shaky- presumably because I wasn't the only person the grantmaker encouraged.  I ended up wasting several hours of my and co-founders time before dropping out, because the project really was not a good fit for the grant.

[if the grantmaker is reading this and recognizes themselves: I'm not mad at you personally]. 

I've been guilty of this too, defaulting to encouraging people to try for something without considering the costs of making the attempt, or the chance of success. It feels so much nicer than telling someone "yeah you're probably not good enough".

A lot of EA job postings encourage people t... (read more)

I have a friend who spent years working on existential risk. Over time his perception of the risks increased, while his perception of what he could do about them decreased (and the latter was more important). Eventually he dropped out of work in a normal sense to play video games, because the enjoyment was worth more to him than what he could hope to accomplish with regular work. He still does occasional short term projects, when they seem especially useful or enjoyable, but his focus is on generating hedons in the time he has left. 

I love this friend as a counter-example to most of the loudest voices on AI risk.You can think p(doom) is very high and have that be all the more reason to play video games. 

I don't want to valorize this too much because I don't want retiring to play video games becoming the cool new thing. The admirable part is that he did his own math and came to his own conclusions in the face of a lot of social pressure to do otherwise. 

HEROIC/REACTIVE VS RESPONSIBLE/PROACTIVE AGENCY

A few month's ago, twitter's big argument was about this AITA, in which a woman left a restaurant to buy ranch dressing. Like most viral AITAs this is probably fake, but the discourse around it is still revealing. The arguments were split between "such agency! good for her for going after what she wants" and "what is she, 3?". I am strongly on the side of people doing what they want with their own food, but in this case I think the people praising her have missed the point, and the people criticizing her have focused on the wrong thing.

I think it's weird but harmless to drown all your food in ranch dressing. But it is, at best, terribly rude to leave a date for 20 minutes to run an errand. If it is so important to you to have ranch on all your food, either check with the restaurant ahead of time or just bring a small bottle by default. 

So this woman is agentic in the sense of "refusing to accept the environment as it is, working to bring it more in line with her preferences". But it's a highly reactive form of agency that creates a lot of negative externalities.

I see this a lot in the way rationalists talk about agency.  What... (read more)

Check my math: how does Enovid compare to to humming?

Nitric Oxide is an antimicrobial and immune booster. Normal nasal nitric oxide is 0.14ppm for women and 0.18ppm for men (sinus levels are 100x higher). journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117…

Enovid is a nasal spray that produces NO. I had the damndest time quantifying Enovid, but this trial registration says 0.11ppm NO/hour. They deliver every 8h and I think that dose is amortized, so the true dose is 0.88. But maybe it's more complicated. I've got an email out to the PI but am not hopeful about a response clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05109…

so Enovid increases nasal NO levels somewhere between 75% and 600% compared to baseline- not shabby. Except humming increases nasal NO levels by 1500-2000%. atsjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.116….

Enovid stings and humming doesn't, so it seems like Enovid should have the larger dose. But the spray doesn't contain NO itself, but compounds that react to form NO. Maybe that's where the sting comes from? Cystic fibrosis and burn patients are sometimes given stratospheric levels of NO for hours or days; if the burn from Envoid came from the NO itself than those patients would be in agony. 

I'm not fi... (read more)

Toy model:

a person's skill level has a floor (what they can do with minimal effort) and ceiling (what they can do with a lot of thought and effort). Ceiling raises come from things we commonly recognize as learning: studying the problem, studying common solution. Floor raises come from practicing the skills you already have, to build fluency in them.

There's a rubber band effect where the farther your ceiling is from your floor, the more work you have to put in to raise it further. At a certain point the efficient thing to do is to grind until you have raised your floor, so that further ceiling raises are cheaper, even if you only care about peak performance. 

My guess for why that happens is your brain has some hard constraints on effort, and raising the floor reduces the effort needed at all levels. E.g. it's easier to do 5-digit multiplication if you've memorized 1-digit times tables. 

My guess is the pots theory of art works best  when a person's skill ceiling is well above their floor. This is true both because it means effort is likely the limiting reagent, the artist will have things to try rather than flailing at random, and they will be able to assess how good a given pot is.

Are impact certificates/retroactive grants the solution to grantmaking corrupting epistemics? They're not viable for everyone, but for people like me who:

1. do a lot of small projects (which barely make sense to apply for grants for individually)
2. benefit from doing what draws their curiosity at the moment (so the delay between grant application and decision is costly)
3. take commitments extremely seriously (so listing a plan on a grant application is very constraining)
4. have enough runway that payment delays and uncertainty for any one project aren't a big deal

They seem pretty ideal.

So why haven't I put more effort into getting retroactive funding? The retroactive sources tend to be crowdsourced. Crowdfunding is miserable in general, and leaves you open to getting very small amounts of money, which feels worse than none at all. Right now I can always preserve the illusion I would get more money, which seems stupid. In particular even if I could get more money for a past project by selling it better and doing some follow up, that time is almost certainly better spent elsewhere. 

A very rough draft of a plan to test prophylactics for airborne illnesses.

Start with a potential superspreader event. My ideal is a large conference,  many of whom travelled to get there, in enclosed spaces with poor ventilation and air purification, in winter. Ideally >=4 days, so that people infected on day one are infectious while the conference is still running. 

Call for sign-ups for testing ahead of time (disclosing all possible substances and side effects). Split volunteers into control and test group. I think you need ~500 sign ups in the winter to make this work. 

Splitting controls is probably the hardest part. You'd like the control and treatment group to be identical, but there are a lot of things that affect susceptibility.  Age, local vs. air travel, small children vs. not, sleep habits... it's hard to draw the line

Make it logistically trivial to use the treatment. If it's lozenges or liquids, put individually packed dosages in every bathroom, with a sign reminding people to use them (color code to direct people to the right basket). If it's a nasal spray you will need to give everyone their own bottle, but make it trivial to get more if someone loses theirs.

Follow-up a week later, asking if people have gotten sick and when. 

If the natural disease load is high enough this should give better data than any paper I've found. 

Top contenders for this plan:

• zinc lozenge 
• salt water gargle
• enovid
• betadine gargle
• zinc gargle

A repost from the discussion on NDAs and Wave (a software company). Wave was recently publicly revealed to have made severance dependent on non-disparagement agreements, cloaked by non-disclosure agreements. I had previously worked at Wave, but negotiated away the non-disclosure agreement (but not the non-disparagement agreement).

But my guess is that most of the people you sent to Wave were capable of understanding what they were signing and thinking through the implications of what they were agreeing to, even if they didn't actually have the conscientious

Problems I am trying to figure out right now:

1. breaking large projects down into small steps. I think this would pay off in a lot of ways: lower context switching costs, work generally easier, greater feelings of traction and satisfaction, instead of "what the hell did I do last week? I guess not much". This is challenging because my projects are, at best ill-defined knowledge work, and sometimes really fuzzy medical or emotional work. I strongly believe the latter have paid off for me on net, but individual actions are often lottery tickets with payouts ... (read more)

"Do or Do Not: There is No Try"

Like all short proverbs each word is doing a lot of work and you can completely flip the meaning by switching between reasonable definitions. 

I think "there is no try" often means "I want to gesture at this but am not going to make a real attempt" in sentences like "I'll try to get to the gym tomorrow" and "I'll try to work on my math homework tonight". 

"there is no try" means "I am going to make an attempt at this but it's not guaranteed to succeed" in sentences like "I'm going to try to bench 400 tomorrow", "I'm t... (read more)

"have one acceptable path and immediately reject anyone who goes off it" cuts you off from a lot of good things, but also a lot of bad things. If you want to remove that constraint to get at the good weirdness, you need to either tank a lot of harm, or come up with more detailed heuristics to prevent it

People talk about sharpening the axe vs. cutting down the tree, but chopping wood and sharpening axes are things we know how to do and know how to measure. When working with more abstract problems there's often a lot of uncertainty in:

1. what do you want to accomplish, exactly?
2. what tool will help you achieve that?
3. what's the ideal form of that tool? 
4. how do you move the tool to that ideal form?
5. when do you hit diminish returns on improving the tool?
6. how do you measure the tool's [sharpness]?

Actual axe-sharpening rarely turns into intellectual masturbation be... (read more)

Some things are coordination problems. Everyone* prefers X to Y, but there are transition costs and people can't organize to get them paid. 

Some things are similar to coordination problems, plus the issue of defectors, Everyone prefers X (no stealing) to Y (constant stealing), but too many prefer X'(no one but me steals). So even if you achieve X, you need to pay maintenance costs. 

Sometimes people want different things. These are not coordination problems.

Sometimes people endorse a thing but don't actually want it. These are not coordination pro... (read more)

I have friends who, early in EA or rationality, did things that look a lot like joining nonlinear. 10+ years later they're still really happy with those decisions. Some of that is selection effects of course, but think some of it is the reasons they joined were very different.

People who joined early SingInst or CEA by and large did it because they'd been personally convinced this group of weirdos was promising. The orgs maybe tried to puff themselves up, but they had almost no social proof. Whereas nowadays saying "this org is EA/rationalist" gives you a b... (read more)

In the spirit of this comment on lions and simulacra levels I present: simulacra and halloween decorations

Level 1: this is actually dangerous. Men running at you with knives, genuinely poisonous animals.

Level 2: this is supposed to invoke genuine fear, which will dissipate quickly when you realize it's fake. Fake poisonous spiders that are supposed to look real, a man with a knife jumps with a fake knife but doesn't stab you, monsters in media that don't exist but hit primal fear buttons in your brain. 

Level 3: reminds people of fear without eve... (read more)

I know we hate the word content but sometimes I need a single word to refer to history books, longrunning horror podcasts, sitcoms, a Construction Physics blog post, and themepark analysis youtube essays. And I don't see any other word volunteering. 

Let's say there's a drug that gives people 20% more energy (or just cognitive energy). My intuition is that if I gave it to 100 people, I would not end up with 120 people's worth of work. Why?

Possibilities:

• the energy gets soaked up by activities other than the ones I am measuring. e.g. you become better at cleaning your house, or socializing, or spend more time on your hobby.
• The benefits accrue to other people- you have more energy which means you lose chore-chicken with your partner, who now has slightly more energy for their stuff.
• Energy wasn't the only

I'm convinced people are less likely to update when they've locked themself into a choice they don't really want.

If I am excited to go to 6 flags and get a headache that will ruin the rollercoasters for me, I change my plans. But if I'm going out of FOMO or to make my someone else happy and I get a headache it doesn't trigger an update to my plans. The utilitarian math on this could check out, but my claim is that's not necessary, once I lock myself in I stop paying attention to pain signals and can't tell if I should leave or not. 

AFAICT, for novel independent work:

genuine backchaining > plan-less intuition or curiosity > fake backchaining.

And most attempts to move people from intuition/curiosity to genuine backchaining end up pushing them towards fake backchaining instead. This is bad because curiosity leads you to absorb a lot of information that will either naturally refine your plans without conscious effort, or support future backchaining. Meanwhile fake backchaining makes you resistant to updating, so it's a very hard state to leave. Also curiosity is fun and fake backch... (read more)

I think it's weird that saying a sentence with a falsehood that doesn't change its informational content is sometimes considered worse than saying nothing, even if it leaves the person better informed than the were before.

This feels especially weird when the "lie" is creating a blank space in a map that you are capable of filling in ( e.g. changing irrelevant details in an anecdote to anonymize a story with a useful lesson), rather than creating a misrepresentation on the map.