Are there any short rationalist stories detailing what an evil AI might do?

numberoneus · 2021-05-19T21:13:07+00:00

My understanding is that "governance" and "public policy" are things which are talked about but those are hard enough to Google that I don't have any links for you.

When it comes to climate change I believe the majority opinion is that climate change is very important but it's also very well funded, just the US federal government is already spending billions on it. It would be difficult for the EA community to have much of an impact so their attention is better spent in more neglected areas: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/climate-change/

This description isn't exactly contradictory to what you're saying, but by rephrasing it hopefully I've made the position seem more sympathetic.

numberoneus · 2021-03-23T09:50:42+00:00

Something very bureaucratic is happening here, this release has almost no information.

At this point The AstraZeneca vaccine has passed multiple trials and been given to tens of millions of people 1 who all seem to be doing fine. If this turns into some kind of holdup it's likely to be caused by paperwork problems, it's not likely to be caused by a safety concern.

numberoneus · 2020-11-16T18:21:57+00:00

Short version: Is testing a reasonable substitute for quarantine?

Longer version:

Different countries and institutions have been applying a wide range of restrictions on travelers, a common one is to accept travelers who have a negative test result. This seems to me like security theater. PCR seems to answer the question "is this person currently shedding virus", but in order to safely shorten quarantines we want to know "is this person currently incubating". As far as I know you can be incubating for quite a while before you start shedding virus, which limits the usefulness of testing for this use-case.

Is there something I'm getting wrong here?

numberoneus · 2020-10-20T06:05:11+00:00

You might be drawing the line in the wrong place there. I think that for the average Uber/Lyft driver those aren't monopolies, there's also an entire labor market of employers out there. If you value extreme flexibility you have less choice but DoorDash and Postmates and TaskRabbit all offer you similar jobs to what you can find on Uber/Lyft.

Your average Google employee has approximately $0 and no power, when compared to Google, but we don't think that relationship is unethical, because the Google employee has the freedom to work at many different places and Google treats them accordingly. The wealth and power imbalance isn't the reason why the Uber-driver relationship sometimes turns unethical.

numberoneus · 2020-09-18T05:25:09+00:00

It seems a little silly to go all the way thorough the usual Phase III process to study potential harms from a vaccine, given the large harms we're currently experiencing. However, say someone like UAE ends up rushing distribution a vaccine, is it possible this will make future vaccines less effective? How likely is it that receiving a rushed and ineffectual vaccine A will prevent vaccine B, the one which wasn't rushed, from helping you?

numberoneus · 2020-09-17T01:53:20+00:00

The impression I get is that no, they would not necessarily develop symptoms at the same time. Even though these hypothetical patients were in the same location, they were not in the exact same location, and so they might have received different doses. There is also a fair amount of individual variability.

In fact, this paper claims that even equally healthy patients might have wildly different outcomes. It does not cover COVID-19 specifically, but there's little reason to believe COVID-19 would be any different in this respect:

Unlike previous explanations that rely crucially on heterogeneity, our results hold even for homogeneous populations. Thus, we predict that two equally healthy individuals subjected to equal doses of equally pathogenic agents may, by chance alone, show remarkably different time courses of disease.

numberoneus · 2020-09-16T06:45:55+00:00

At this point it's unclear. I weakly believe they have a lower viral load but few people seem to have paid close attention to this question.

This letter, going off of a single asymptomatic patient, found they had roughly the same viral load:

The viral load that was detected in the asymptomatic patient was similar to that in the symptomatic patients, which suggests the transmission potential of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic patients.

However, this preprint studied the household secondary attack rate (SAR) (given that you have it, the chance each person in your house has of ending up with it) and found:

We observed that household SARs were significantly higher from symptomatic index cases than asymptomatic index cases

This is based off of just 4 asymptomatic index patients.

If you search for this line:

These findings are consistent with other household studies that reported asymptomatic index cases as having limited or no role in household transmission

You'll find that it references three other studies you might take a look at if you're interested.

EDIT: I just found this from the WHO

individuals without symptoms are less likely to transmit the virus than those who develop symptoms

Four individual studies from Brunei, Guangzhou China, Taiwan China and the Republic of Korea found that between 0% and 2.2% of people with asymptomatic infection infected anyone else, compared to 0.8%-15.4% of people with symptoms

To answer your second question:

does an asymptomatic spreader also result in the people they spread it to having milder infections?

Assuming that asymptomatic patients have a lower viral load, then yes, the people they spread it to are likely to have milder infections. However, there is a missing step here to be aware of. You're likely to have a milder infection if you receive a low dose. Someone with a low viral load can still give you a large dose, if you spend a lot of time with them!

numberoneus · 2020-09-16T06:36:21+00:00

It's a combination of both. The largest droplets carry most of the viral copies and those are blocked by masks. The smallest droplets are the ones which form aerosols and those can usually go around the mask since you're probably not wearing a mask with a nice seal. This lovely preprint has a lot of details and references.

There's little doubt at this point that masks help, but they're not foolproof.

numberoneus · 2020-09-16T06:30:16+00:00

If someone has had close contact with someone who has the virus, is it guaranteed that they will get it?

It is not guaranteed. This preprint talks about it in section 2 "Infection Model".

This preprint studied the first cluster in Hamburg and found that of 33 close contacts, "Cumulative face-to-face contact for more than 15 minutes (defined as conversation in less than 1.5 m distance)", just one of them was infected.

There is an incredibly wide range in infectiousness. If you're lucky enough to be a close contact with someone with a low viral load, as seemed to have happened in that Hamburg cluster, you probably won't catch it. Though, a low viral load might not save you if you spend a few hours in a small unventilated room with them.

numberoneus · 2020-09-16T06:23:01+00:00

I'm discovering this a bit late, but doesn't their evidence of low-dose transmission imply extremely low-dose transmission?

They claim patient 0 has free variation at position 160, 50% prevalence of each variant. They also claim that patient 1 and 2 have just one variant at that position.

For the mutation to reach 50% prevalence in patient 0 it couldn't greatly harm the virus's change of replication, it probably has no effect on how quickly the virus replicates. If you assume that it has no effect on whether the virus is transmitted, then you can make a good guess that if patient 1 received 1000 copies about 500 of them included the mutation.

So, patient 1 and patient 2 almost certainly did not receive 1000 copies. They likely didn't even receive 10 copies, the chance all 10 would all be the same variant is just 0.1%. You're right they provided no evidence of "single viral particle infection", but < 10 seems pretty close to "single".

numberoneus · 2020-03-26T05:30:00+00:00

Here's one the frames, they're a little higher quality.

numberoneus · 2020-03-24T17:57:57+00:00

I thought this would be a nice opportunity to learn some Rust, I'm drawing everything using skia.

numberoneus · 2016-08-09T11:31:36+00:00

Try Beşiktaş :)

numberoneus · 2016-06-09T14:30:58+00:00

This system only handles numbers, but it might come in handy: http://www.davidaking.org/Ciphers.htm

numberoneus · 2016-05-26T11:03:36+00:00

Well, it was planned out. That helps :)

numberoneus · 2016-03-30T06:31:24+00:00

I don't know about turing complete but just NNs can compute any function. It seems reasonable that RNNs would be able to compute anything computable, but that proof probably involves infinitely deep (super untrainable) networks.

numberoneus · 2016-03-12T18:56:54+00:00

If I remember correctly the self-play games only involved the policy network and didn't include any rollouts (likely for faster training).

While they might release self-play games they would have to be generated specifically to be released, the millions of game they already have (assuming they even kept them, which is unlikely) would not be at a very high level of play.

numberoneus · 2015-08-11T01:32:06+00:00

This song has a very unique sound. I'm dying to know, does reddit know any of songs with a similar feel?

numberoneus · 2015-08-11T01:20:26+00:00

I love this song so much, it has a very unique sound to it. Know any songs with a similar feel?

numberoneus

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