DirectedEvolution

• DirectedEvolutionFeb 5, 2023, 7:50 PM

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: H5N1 - thread for in­for­ma­tion shar­ing, plan­ning, and action

  Full agree! A track record of human-to-human spread with limited transmissibility is an update against a change in that area, and a new event of rapid mink-to-mink spread is an update for. Not sure how to balance them out mathematically, but it’s important to keep both in mind.

• DirectedEvolutionFeb 5, 2023, 3:01 PM

  8 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Monica’s comment on: H5N1 - thread for in­for­ma­tion shar­ing, plan­ning, and action

  Tamiflu is oseltamivir. CDC has info on antivirals and vaccines for H5N1 and H7N9.

  Tl;dr: we have 3 antivirals, but some evidence of resistance, and a small stockpile of candidate vaccines, though the virus mutates fast.

  Antiviral Drugs Can Be Used to Treat Illness

  CDC currently recommends treatment with a neuraminidase inhibitor for human infection with avian influenza A viruses. Analyses of available avian influenza viruses circulating worldwide suggest that most viruses are susceptible to oseltamivir, peramivir, and zanamivir. However, some evidence of antiviral resistance has been reported in HPAI Asian lineage avian influenza A(H5N1) viruses (“Asian H5N1 viruses”) and Asian lineage avian influenza A(H7N9) viruses (“Asian H7N9 viruses”). Monitoring for antiviral resistance among avian influenza A viruses is crucial and ongoing.

  CDC has posted guidance for health professionals and laboratorians.

  U.S. Government Stockpiling Asian H5N1 and Asian H7N9 Vaccines If Needed

  The United States federal government maintains a stockpile – vaccines, including vaccine against Asian H5N1 and Asian H7N9 viruses. The stockpiled vaccines could be used if similar viruses were to begin transmitting easily from person to person. Since influenza viruses change, CDC continues to make candidate vaccine viruses as needed. Creating a candidate vaccine virus is the first step in producing a vaccine. More information about “Making a candidate Vaccine Virus (CVV) for a Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (Bird Flu) Virus” is available.

• DirectedEvolutionFeb 5, 2023, 2:57 PM

  11 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: H5N1 - thread for in­for­ma­tion shar­ing, plan­ning, and action

  I’ve gathered more information on the current status at my H5N1 pandemic prediction checklist.

Pan­demic Pre­dic­tion Check­list: H5N1 (6/​14)

• DirectedEvolutionFeb 5, 2023, 2:37 PM

  5 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: H5N1 - thread for in­for­ma­tion shar­ing, plan­ning, and action

  Also, with regard to human vaccines, my understanding is they’re in low stock and only tested for seroconversion, since we don’t use them widely enough to get direct data on efficacy. We also have poultry vaccines but don’t use them widely, and it seems their effectiveness is inconsistent. So much to be improved on in the realm of H5N1 vaccine tech.

• DirectedEvolutionFeb 5, 2023, 2:24 PM

  7 points

  5 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: H5N1 - thread for in­for­ma­tion shar­ing, plan­ning, and action

  The main concern now is that we’re seeing unprecedented likely mammal-to-mammal spread. I don’t know what seems intuitive to most people, but this is the reason for heightened concern around the issue. Whatever your priors were before, this should probably update you towards a bigger risk of human-to-human spread.

• DirectedEvolutionFeb 3, 2023, 9:26 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Stavros’s comment on: Why are we not talk­ing more about the metacrisis per­spec­tive on ex­is­ten­tial risk?

  Do you think civilization generally is fragile? Or just like post industrial civilization? We have seen the collapse and reconstruction of civilization to varying degrees across history. But we’ve never seen the collapse and revitalization of an industrial society. Is it specifically that you think we’ve used up some key inputs to starting an industrial civ, like maybe easily accessible coal and oil reserves or something?

• DirectedEvolutionFeb 3, 2023, 1:53 PM

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Stavros’s comment on: Why are we not talk­ing more about the metacrisis per­spec­tive on ex­is­ten­tial risk?

  Just a note on your communication style, at least on EA forum I think it would help if you replaced more of your “deckchairs on the Titanic” and “forest for the trees” metaphores with specific examples, even hypothetical.

  For example, when you say “I would say all of these areas are either underprioritized or, as in the case of global health, often missing the forest for the trees (literally—saving trees without doing anything about the existential threat to the forest itself),” I actually don’t know what you mean. What are the forest and what are trees in this example? Like, you say “literally saving trees,” but unless you for some reason consider forest preservation to fall under the umbrella of global health, it’s not literally saving trees.

  Anyway, I think I see a little more where you’re coming from, let me know if I’m misunderstanding.

  • You start by assuming that a civilizational collapse would be irrecoverable, and just about as bad as human extinction.

  • Given that assumption, you see a lot of bad stuff that could wipe out civilization without necessarily killing everybody, like a global food supply disaster, a pandemic, a war, climate change, energy production problems, etc.

  • Since all these potential sources of collapse seem just as bad as human extinction, you think it’x worth putting effort into all of them.

  • EA often prioritizes protecting human/​sentient life directly, but doesn’t focus that hard on things like evaluating risks to the global energy supply except insofar as those risks stem from problems that might also just kill a lot of people, like a pandemic or ΑΙ run amok.

  Overall, it seems like you think there’s a lot more sources of fragility than EA takes into account, lots of ways civilization could collapse, and EA’s only looking at a few.

  Is that roughly where you’re coming from?

• DirectedEvolutionFeb 2, 2023, 6:21 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Stavros’s comment on: Why are we not talk­ing more about the metacrisis per­spec­tive on ex­is­ten­tial risk?

  We have less time to make a difference than is commonly believed in EA circles

  How much time do you think we have? My impression is that a lot of EAs at least are operating with a sense of extreme urgency over their AI timelines and expectations of risk (i.e. 10 years, 99% chance of doom). It would be informative to give a numeric estimate of X years until Y consequence, accepting that it’s imprecise.

  Thus interventions which aren’t directly or indirectly targeting the life support system

  So it sounds like you are an X-risk guy, which is a very mainstream EA position. Although I’m not sure if you’re a “last 1%-er,” as in weighing the complete loss of human life much more heavily than losing say 99% of human life. But it sounds like your main contention is that weird complicated environmental/​economic/​population interactions that are very hard to see directly will somehow lead to doom if not corrected.

  Overall there’s a motte here, which is “not all interventions help solve the problem you really care about, sometimes for complicated reasons.” I’m just not sure what the big insight is about what to do, given that fact, that we’re not already doing.

• DirectedEvolutionJan 31, 2023, 11:01 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Stavros’s comment on: Why are we not talk­ing more about the metacrisis per­spec­tive on ex­is­ten­tial risk?

  So I have a lot of questions. I’ll try to ask them one or two at a time.

  It seems like you’re claiming something like this:

  “Clearly, there are a bunch of emergencies, which have causes and solutions. For a lot of them, we know what the causes and solutions are, but don’t implement them. That is probably because our global institutions have big complicated effects on each other, but nobody has a very good predictive model of what the chain of cause and effect is or how to intervene in it productively. Like, if you wanted to pass a carbon tax, what would you even do?

  Probably, if we studied that, we could figure out some sort of complicated way to make all these global institutions fit together way better, so that we’d be just a lot happier with life. It’s sort of like we have a medieval doctor’s understanding of how the body works, and we’d be a lot better of stopping trying to ‘treat’ most problems and start trying to study how the body works in detail. Except instead of the body, it’s ‘global institutions and culture’ and instead of medicine it’s all sorts of political/​cultural/​economic/​scientific interventions.”

  Is that roughly what you mean?

• DirectedEvolutionJan 30, 2023, 8:57 PM

  25 points

  8 ∶ 1

  on: Karma over­rates some top­ics; re­sult­ing is­sues and po­ten­tial solutions

  I think one of the more underused features of the forum is the ability to adjust the visibility of posts according to their tags. If everybody used this feature and wanted to see fewer community-tagged posts, they could downweight their visibility. The fact that they don’t could mean that most people do want to see these posts, but it could also mean that they’re unaware of this feature, haven’t had the idea of turning it on for community posts, or just haven’t gotten around to it.

  I could see you doing either of these:

  • Making this feature more visible. Perhaps a hovertext option to adjust the visibility of certain tags, a pinned post explaining how to use it, etc. Edit: hovertext adjust is already a feature. What might be a nice add would be some common “adjust bundles.” For example, there are a lot of community-related tags (“criticism of EA culture”) for example, and posts aren’t reliably tagged with all applicable tags. It’s kind of tedious to manually search for and enter adjustments for each relevant tag. Having a single button to adjust all tags related to community by say 100 karma increments would be nice.

  • Nudges, such as enabling this feature for new users by default, or even for all users. Potentially you could turn it on for everyone, but send everybody a PM saying what you did and how to reverse it if desired.

  A subforum also seems fine, it just seems like a potentially more expensive and buggy option that adds complexity to the forum structure.

  What links here?

  • Lizka's comment on Karma over­rates some top­ics; re­sult­ing is­sues and po­ten­tial solutions by Lizka (Feb 2, 2023, 2:31 PM; 2 points)

• DirectedEvolutionJan 30, 2023, 7:28 PM

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Stavros’s comment on: Why are we not talk­ing more about the metacrisis per­spec­tive on ex­is­ten­tial risk?

  Based on the article you linked, it seems like ‘meta-crisis’ thinking employs a bundle of concepts that LessWrong often calls ‘Moloch’ or ‘simulacra levels’ or ‘inadequate equilibria’ or simply tradeoffs. This line of analysis attempts to use these ideas to explain failures of collective action to implement complex institutional change, and generate solutions to overcome this inertia.

  I’m sympathetic to the need to address issues of governance and collective action. However, what interests me are clear problem-solution pairs with good evidence, a straightforward mechanism, and adequate information feedback to see if it’s working. “We should switch to approval voting” meets those criteria.

  I’m less excited about interrogating “the very idea of ‘the economy’ or what exactly we mean by ‘money’” or the idea that “too much liberty may kill liberalism, too much voting can weaken democracies, and we don’t always understand how we understand, we tend to deny our denial, and we are struggling to imagine a new imaginary.”

• DirectedEvolutionJan 29, 2023, 11:14 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: Why are we not talk­ing more about the metacrisis per­spec­tive on ex­is­ten­tial risk?

  The term “crisis” (in “metacrisis”) makes it sound like it’s something new and acute, but it seems that we’ve had coordination problems for all of history. Though maybe their effects are getting worse because of accelerating technological progress?

  This would be surprising to me, since so much of tech progress is the creation of social coordination technologies (internet and social media platforms, cell phones and computers, new modes of transport, cheaper food and safer water that simplifies logistics of human movement, new institutions, new language and theories, new educational resources).

  Perhaps, however, the explosion in social coordination technologies makes it easier for self-interested and antisocial groups to coordinate for private advantage at the expense of the public.

  For example, one lens on American slavery might be a transition from:

  • No pro-slavery social coordination infrastructure/​technology

  • Increasing amounts of pro-slavery coordination allow a horrific trans-Atlantic slave trade

  • Gradually increasing anti-slavery coordination undermine, then finally destroy the slave trade

  • A modern back and forth of coordination as a result of conflict pressures between human traffickers and anti-trafficking police, as well as among racist police institutions and individuals and anti-racist activists

  In these scenarios of conflict, increased coordination technology is neither intrinsically good or bad. It’s just a tool that may give a net advantage to the good guys, bad guys, or neither, depending on context.

  That being said, it may be that improving specific forms of coordination technology that help us toward betteer ends is still what we need the most. I’m very receptive to that view. Better voting mechanisms, better science distillation mechanisms, better institutions, better tax policy, better ways of dealing with the risks of specific forms of technological development, etc.

  I guess I just think that insofar as these are concerns of the meta-crisisians, they’re also things we deal with pretty thoroughly in EA through our own lenses. I’d be curious to know what the concept of “meta-crisis” offers in terms of further clarifying the problems or proposing new solutions.

• DirectedEvolutionJan 29, 2023, 7:09 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Stavros’s comment on: Why are we not talk­ing more about the metacrisis per­spec­tive on ex­is­ten­tial risk?

  Where can we find a solid written introduction to the concept of “meta-crisis?” I haven’t watched any of the Youtube videos and probably won’t even if they’re good, but I’d be interested in a written resource if available.

• DirectedEvolutionJan 29, 2023, 3:56 PM

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Why are we not talk­ing more about the metacrisis per­spec­tive on ex­is­ten­tial risk?

  I tried googling it, and just found a few YouTube videos, the Consilience Project, and a few blog posts, most of which are not on “the meta crisis” but on specific issues. The lack of written content and in particular ways to define and interrogate the concept of “meta crisis” makes this feel not very compelling, but I might be missing a treasure trove somewhere!

• DirectedEvolutionJan 29, 2023, 1:04 AM

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ex­cal­i­draw: Why and How to Use it

  I bookmarked it and found a chance to use it already today! In general, I appreciate finding out about tools for rational discourse enhancement. Encouraging others to post them even if they don’t get too many upvotes.

• DirectedEvolutionJan 23, 2023, 6:50 PM

  24 points

  7 ∶ 0

  on: Find­ing bugs in GiveWell’s top charities

  I think this post is really pretty good. What I’d like to see, either included here or in future work, is a plain-language description of your assumptions and conclusions. I tried to make one, which went something like this:

  GiveWell’s global health work saves lives, but the people they save go on to destroy insect habitat. The worth of a single insect is negligible relative to that of a human, but so many of them die when forests get cut down that global health efforts in certain locations could conceivably be bad overall. This side effect would be especially bad in countries where the most deforestation per capita is going on, and where habitat for insects is particularly lush.

  Based on a shallow dive and plugging some numbers into a simple model, the results suggest we should reallocate human health resources out of a few countries and into other countries where less habitat destruction is happening, or reallocate some of those resources to preserving habitat. We really need to research this more carefully before taking these conclusions too seriously—but these early results suggest it would be worth the effort.

  It would also be nice to move the acronyms (i.e. t_a) to the figure captions where they’re presented, and work on better formatting the tables. You’ve done the research and thinking, so take a little more time to polish up the presentation so we can read it more easily :)

• DirectedEvolutionJan 20, 2023, 1:09 AM

  6 points

  4 ∶ 0

  on: An­nounc­ing Cavendish Labs

  Best of luck to you! I’d be interested in hearing in more depth about your team, specific project ideas, funding situation if you care to share. My particular interest is in the pandemic prevention/​far UVC work.

• DirectedEvolutionJan 18, 2023, 7:43 PM

  10 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: ConcernedEAs’s comment on: Do­ing EA Better

  OOOOHHHHHHHH

• DirectedEvolutionJan 18, 2023, 5:23 PM

  7 points

  1 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Guy Raveh’s comment on: Do­ing EA Better

  That is a fair rebuttal.

  I would come back to the model of a value-aligned group with a specific set of tasks seeking to maximize its effectiveness at achieving the objective. This is the basis for the collective intelligence research that is cited here as the basis for their recommendations for greater diversity.

  If you frame EA as a single group trying to achieve the task of “make the entire world better for all human beings by implementing high-leverage interventions” then it does seem relevant to get input from a diverse cross-section of humanity about what they consider to be their biggest problems and how proposed solutions would play out.

  One way to get that feedback is to directly include a demographically representative sample of humanity in EA directly as active participants. I have no problem with that outcome. I just think we can ⁸⁰⁄₂₀ it by seeking feedback on specific proposals.

  I also think that basing our decisions about what to pursue based on the personal opinions of a representative sample of humanity will lead us to prioritize the selfish small issues of a powerful majority over the enormous issues faced by underrepresented minorities, such as animals, the global poor, and the denizens of the far future. I think this because I think that the vast majority of humanity is not value-aligned with the principle of altruistic utility maximization.

  For these two main reasons—the ability to seek feedback from relevant demographics when necessary, and the value mismatch between EA and humanity in general—I do not see the case for us being unable to operate effectively given our current demographic makeup. I do think that additional diversity might help. I just think that it is one of a range of interventions, it’s not obvious to me that it’s the most pressing priority, and broadening EA risks to pursue diversity purely for its own sake risks value misalignment with newcomers. Please interpret this in a moderate stance along the lines of “I invite diversity, I just think it’s not the magic solution to fix all of EA’s problems with effectiveness and the important thing is ‘who does EA talk to’ more than ‘who calls themselves an EA’.”