asclepius

Karma: 165

asclepius 24 May 2023 20:46 UTC
−3 points
0 ∶ 1
on: Lessons learned from offering in-office nutritional testing
I think it’s good to point out vegans who aren’t careful can get nutritional deficiencies.

Seems like a lot (all?) of logistical issues could be fixed by just having a primary care physician who is willing to order these labs, which would probably be covered by insurance if you have symptoms (fatigue would count). I order them all the time as a physician in a primary care setting.

Most EA jobs I’ve seen offer health insurance, which usually includes a PCP.

Plus they can help with result interpretation, though GPT-4 does a pretty good job of that already.

asclepius 5 Sep 2022 0:55 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Colin Rust’s comment on: [Cause Exploration Prizes] Crime Reduction
I don’t think that’s correct. There’s a recent study showing a reduction in mortality for prisoners that are incarcerated relative to a control group of people who were not incarcerated. It appears that most of the reduction in mortality is from reduction in overdose death risk but also a reduction in homicide. The implication is that people in prisons are safer than they would be outside. Probably most of the data showing otherwise comes from poorly done studies that don’t use appropriate control groups, EG they may use the general population as control group relative to prisoners.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3644719

asclepius 5 Jul 2022 2:48 UTC
13 points
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on: My Most Likely Reason to Die Young is AI X-Risk

asclepius 25 Jun 2022 1:25 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: NunoSempere’s comment on: A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform
I think it is an impressive effect, though I agree people not wanting to be in prison is more important.
Using a panel of all defendants over the seven years after sentencing, we fnd that incarcerated defendants have a more than 60% lower mortality rate during the time of incarceration than similar defendants who were not incarcerated (an average of 230 deaths per hundred thousand annually as compared to 587 deaths per hundred thousand annually). The main sources of these differences are dramatically lower risks of mortality from homicide, overdose, or suicide during the period of incarceration. Defendants also have a lower risk of mortality from natural causes of death such as heart disease while incarcerated, potentially due to increased access to medical care

asclepius 23 Jun 2022 12:19 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: NunoSempere’s comment on: A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform
I wonder if this paper, which appears to show that incarceration reduces prisoner mortality relative to non-incarcerted but criminal-justice-involved people, should change your estimates of CJ reform benefits. Given that, it seems plausible that reducing prison stays actually increases mortality for prisoners.
Another interesting thing about this paper is the implication that the previous work on this topic (which used the general population as the control group) was flawed in an obvious way. That should generally lower our opinion of the academic literature on this topic.

asclepius 17 Jun 2022 17:11 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Linch’s comment on: A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform
That’s an interesting idea. It seems like an effort that would require a lot of subject-matter expertise, so your idea to commision the CJ folks makes sense.
I do wonder if cause areas that rely on academic fields which we have reason to believe may be ideologically biased would generally benefit from some red-teaming process.

asclepius 16 Jun 2022 17:51 UTC
27 points
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on: A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform
Excellent post. I have a strong prior that academic literature on criminology is biased, so I am more inclined than you to guess that consensus estimates for criminal justice reform not having net negative effects on crime are too optimistic. So my guess for second-order effects is that they make criminal justice reform even less valuable relative to other global health/wellness causes.
Putting that aside, I think one reason Open Phil might have been so favorably inclined to criminal justice reform was the bipartisan consensus that pursuing it was a good idea. The 2010′s were a uniquely good time to purse criminal justice reform (until ~ 2020, when increasing crime rates made criminal justice reform less bipartisan).
Perhaps you could call this the “The Hinge Hypothesis”—during the years that Open Phil made large donations to criminal justice reform efforts, it was a uniquely good time to do so. I think this was a reasonable guess, though I don’t think it brings the QALYs/$ to parity with other global health/wellness goals.

asclepius 3 Jun 2022 19:43 UTC
5 points
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on: Forecasting Newsletter: May 2022
missing something here
: “Peter Wildeford looks at the chances of accidental nuclear war (a), by giving the chance of a nuclear incident based on historical frequency using Laplace’s law, and then his”

asclepius 18 May 2022 15:40 UTC
6 points
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on: Fertility and Infertility: less related than you might think
Another reason to doubt the infertility-->declining birth rate story is that some populations that live in similar environments have maintained very high fertility rates.

Ultra Orthodox Jews live close to other city dweller in the US, have high-ish levels of obesity (implying similar food environment to average westerner, which is a reason to think Amish living as farmers might be exempt), and have high fertility rates.

Also, there are some factors, like much better treatment of STDs, that should, all other things being equal, reduce infertility rates. Historically, STDs could be a major cause of infertility.

Also, the relationship between sperm count and conception rates is not linear. IIRC, after about 20 million/ML, higher sperm counts don’t mean higher conception rates. So a 25% reduction in sperm count might not have much effect on conception rates for most men above that threshold, if that decline is even real.

(Apologies for the lack of citations, on mobile, will link later)

asclepius 3 Mar 2022 15:01 UTC
12 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Incremental Institutional Review Board Reform
Epistemic Institutions, Values and Reflective Process
Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) regulate biomedical and social science research. In addition to slowing and deterring life-saving biomedical research, IRBs interfere with controversial but useful social science research, eg, Scott Atran was deterred from studying Jihadi terrorists; Mark Kleiman was deterred from studying the California prison system, and a Florida State University IRB cited public controversy as a reason to deter research. We would like to see a group focused on advocating for plausible reforms to IRBs that allow more social science research to be performed. Some plausible examples:
1. Prof. Omri Ben-Shahar’s proposal to replace exempt IRB reviews with an electronic checklist or
2. Zachary Schrag’s proposal (from Ethical Imperialism) that Congress remove social science research from OHRP jurisdiction by amending the National Research Act of 1974.
Concrete steps to these goals could be:
1. sponsoring a prize for the first university that allowed use of Prof. Omri Ben-Shahar’s electronic checklist tool;
2. setting up a journal for “Deterred Social Science Research”, in which professors publicly submit research proposals that their IRBs have rejected.

asclepius 3 Mar 2022 14:57 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Replacing Institutional Review Boards with Strict Liability
Biorisk, Epistemic Institutions, Values and Reflective Process
Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) regulate biomedical and social science research. As a result of their risk-averse nature, important biomedical research is slowed or deterred entirely; eg, the UK human challenge trial was delayed by several months because of a protracted ethics review process and an enrollment delay in a thrombolytics trial cost thousands of lives. In the US, a plausible challenge to IRB legality can be mounted on First Amendment grounds. We would be interested in funding a civil rights challenge to IRB legality, with the eventual goal of FDA guidance on control groups and strict liability replacing IRBs as a means of research regulation. This would have substantial overlap with our project idea of rapid countermeasure development to new pathogens.

asclepius 8 Jan 2022 1:22 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Devin Kalish’s comment on: The Bioethicists are (Mostly) Alright
Glad you didn’t see any factual error in the posts!
#1, Yeah, you’re totally right that “bioethicists” is the wrong target. Will try to use “institutionalized research ethics” going forward. It is much more explicit about what the problem is and more fair to bioethicists.
re #2, sort of agreed. I tend to think the public doesn’t like weird ideas in general, but there was a recent paper showing higher public support for challenge trials than traditional trials. So I’m not sure what counts as weird to the public as a whole. It might be the case that the public has surprisingly EA-ish ideas on medical ethics, at least on this specific issue. Not sure.

asclepius 7 Jan 2022 23:26 UTC
33 points
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on: The Bioethicists are (Mostly) Alright
You raise a bunch of good points and you’re 100% right that when I write “bioethicists” on twitter I should really write “institutionalized research ethics”. Not doing do so is sloppy of me. I think I do a better job showing the institutional dynamics bioethicists work under in my blogposts, so I think those hold up okay. But I’ll look at those posts again and see if I think they need some edits.
Mostly agree with: “worth some eyebrow-raising if it turns out that the ingroup defense is something along the lines of “well, by bioethicists, we mean research ethicists, and by research ethicists we mean research bureaucrats, and by research bureaucrats, we mean research bureaucracy.”
Your survey data on actual bioethicists’ opinions was slightly surprising to me, so I should update on that.
My criticism of bioethics is aimed at bioethics-as-practiced-by-institutions, which does seem bad and deserve criticism, but you’re right that the causal story here is definitely not [bioethicists are the sole reason big institutions are risk-averse] and so blaming only them doesn’t make sense. My own posts basically argue that institutions use IRB’s as a means of reputation/PR control, so in some sense I should exonerate bioethicists per se and focus on the institutional dynamics and laws that led to that equilibrium.
Incidentally, this does lead me to two points of possible (not sure of your views) disagreement:
1. I think you’re right that practically speaking, engagement with bioethicists is good. But if we take your point that institutionalized research ethics per se is the problem, not bad bioethicists, that suggests we should pay a lot of attention towards changing institutional dynamics, instead of just the opinions of the people inside them. In the case of institutional research ethics, that would look like advocating for specific changes in legislation or federal directives, so that institutional incentives change. In other words, arguing/discussing with bioethicists is good, but we should also try to change the law that leads to bad research ethics. It might be the case that institutional caution is the inevitable consequence of societal risk-tolerance declining and/or older institutions being cautious, but there still might be changes we can make at the margin.
2. I’m not sure that some vaguely EA-ish/ EA-curious people criticizing bioethics is properly characterized as a “war”. Even if it is, my really vague historical sense of political change is that reforming entrenched institutions (like research ethics) often requires relatively strong public disagreement and criticism. So I’m personally really unsure if your instrumental argument holds up. But this is pretty subjective, so I’m happy to mostly drop this because your other points on more accurate terminology and institutional dynamics are spot-on.

asclepius 30 Nov 2021 18:06 UTC
11 points
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in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Maybe Antivirals aren’t a Useful Priority for Pandemics?
Interesting though not super important piece of information: Rabies is ~100% fatal once symptoms present, but there is evidence that even without vaccination, some humans have been exposed and survived, they just didn’t realize it.

asclepius 30 Nov 2021 18:02 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: Tessa A 🔸’s comment on: Maybe Antivirals aren’t a Useful Priority for Pandemics?
I was about to post this. There are now two effective antivirals for COVID-19, developed relatively quickly, which makes me update towards antiviral development being a little easier and more promising than I thought.
In addition, the historic antivirals with great success are against HIV and Hepatitis C and are targeted against a chronic disease. Herpes and CMV have antiviral treatments and are somewhat more acute (though Herpes is a chronic disease with acute flare-ups), but COVID-19 is more acute than those two.
So my skepticism towards effective antivirals for acute illnesses is lower than before.

asclepius 18 Nov 2021 14:57 UTC
8 points
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in reply to: pradyuprasad’s comment on: EA Should Spend Its “Funding Overhang” on Curing Infectious Diseases
I don’t think it is actually a pessimistic paper for the pro-AMC case. The top-line result of “only 6 cents of additional R&D spending per dollar” is just part of the story. My summary of that paper:
1. Finkelstein finds large benefits (billions of dollars worth) from the increases in coverage paid for at only moderate (in the tens of millions $ range) cost. This is the “static benefit” of increasing vaccine coverage given the generally large benefits of higher vaccination rates.
2. Finkelstein looks at Hepatitis B and the flu vaccine more closely and basically concludes (A) that the induced increase in R&D for Hep-B was useless because the existing vaccine was already excellent (90% efficacy, few side effects), so it couldn’t be much improved upon, but (B) that the flu vaccine R&D was very useful, somewhere in the billions range, because it likely caused the development of the newer flu vaccine, which is apparently quite a bit more effective. This is the “dynamic benefit” of increased R&D causing an improvement in vaccine efficacy.
I think the take-away is that if AMC’s act like the instrument Finkelstein uses here, we shouldn’t expect an AMC to stimulate a lot more private pharma investment, but they could still be very cost-effective if they resulted in an efficacious vaccine or if they sped up rollout. Notably, speeding up rollout is basically what Finkelstein found happened with the Hepatitis B vaccine.
So AMC’s could still be very cost-effective if the vaccine developed is effective and/or roll-out is sped up, as in the GAVI Pneumococcus AMC case.
Another factor is that Finkelstein examined the effects of increased revenue on already existing vaccines, while the proposed AMC’s would mostly be focused on new vaccines.
My guess is that if Finkelstein found a big dynamic benefit from more R&D in the flu vaccine case just by a moderate increase in vaccine efficacy, then going from 0 efficacy (no vaccine) to moderate/substantial efficacy (new vaccine with vaccine efficacy of 75%) would yield large dynamic benefits. But I might be misunderstanding this part- not super confident in this.

asclepius 4 Oct 2021 13:11 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: Robin Hanson on the Long Reflection
It seems unlikely but not impossible given how strong status quo bias is among humans. NIMBY movement, reactionary and conservative politics in general, lots of examples of politics that call for less or no change.
Humans have had periods of tens or hundreds of thousands of years where we stagnate and technology doesn’t seem to change much, as far as we can tell from the archaeological record, so this isn’t unprecedented.

asclepius 3 Oct 2021 19:11 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: Robin Hanson on the Long Reflection
If Hanson thinks WBE and his resultant predictions are likely barring some external event or radical change, and also doesn’t favor a Long Reflection, isn’t that equivalent to saying his scenario is more desirable than the Long Reflection?

asclepius 3 Oct 2021 17:34 UTC
31 points
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on: Robin Hanson on the Long Reflection
While Hanson is correct that the Long Reflection is rather dystopian, his alternatives are worse, and his “Age of EM” gives plenty of examples from a hypothetical society that is more dystopian than the “Long Reflection”.
Hanson’s scenario of “a very real possibility that this regime could continue forever” is certainly worrying, but I view it as an improvement over certain alternatives, namely, AGI destroying humanity, severe values-drift from unconstrained whole brain emulation + editing + economic pressures, and resultant S-risk type scenarios.
So I don’t agree that a Long Reflection is worse than those alternatives.
More speculatively, I think he understates how prevalent status-quo bias is, here:
“the effect of preventing all such changes over a long period, allowing only the changes required to support philosophical discussions, would be to have changed society enormously, including changing common attitudes and values regarding change. ”
Most of human history is extremely static relative to history post the Industrial Revolution, so humanity seems well-adapted to a static society. There are substantial political movements dedicated to slowing or reversing change. The average human attitude towards change is not uniformly positive!