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All of mike_mclaren's Comments + Replies

Thanks for the post! I wanted to add a clarification regarding the discussion of metagenomic sequencing,

The first is metagenomic sequencing. This is technology that can take a sample from a patient or the environment and sequence all DNA and RNA in it, matching them against databases of known organisms. An example of a practical deployment would be to use it for diagnostic conundrums — if a doctor can’t work out why a patient is so sick, they can take a sample and send it to a central lab for metagenomic sequencing. If China had had this technology, they

... (read more)

Toby_Ord

Thanks Mike — a very useful correction. I'm genuinely puzzled as to why this didn't lead to a more severe early response given China's history with SARS. That said, I can't tell from the article how soon the sample from this patient was sequenced/analysed.

Three Reasons Early Detection Interventions Are Not Obviously Cost-Effective

mike_mclaren2y11

Excellent post; I did not read it carefully enough to evaluate much of the details, but these are all things we are concerned with at the Nucleic Acid Observatory and I think your three "Reasons" is a great breakdown of the core issues.

mike_mclaren's Quick takes

mike_mclaren3y15

Philosophy

In his recent interview on the 80000 Hours Podcast, Toby Ord discussed how nonstandard analysis and its notion of hyperreals may help resolve some apparent issues arising from infinite ethics (link to transcript). For those interested in learning more about nonstandard analysis, there are various books and online resources. Many involve fairly high-level math as they are aimed at putting what was originally an intuitive but imprecise idea onto rigorous footing. Instead of those, you might want to check out a book like that of H. Jerome Keisler's Elementary... (read more)

Concrete Biosecurity Projects (some of which could be big)

mike_mclaren4y1

Great!

Concrete Biosecurity Projects (some of which could be big)

mike_mclaren4y3

Potentially - this is something myself and others working on metagenomic monitoring have discussed and would like to investigate the practicalities of. If anyone has connections to international airlines or knows about the legalities/ownership of airline waste, I'd be interested in chatting.

Alex D 🔸

My company has a few airline and airport clients. My understanding is that waste management is a service the airport provides to the airlines, and I'd guess there are third party contractors involved. I'll be on the lookout for opportunities to learn more, and report back if I hear anything useful.

Information hazards: a very simple typology

mike_mclaren5y4

It seems that Sandberg is discussing something like this typology in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn2vgQGNI_c

Edit: Sandberg starts talking about three categories of hazards at ~12:00

AMA: Ajeya Cotra, researcher at Open Phil

mike_mclaren5y1

I see, thank you!

AMA: Ajeya Cotra, researcher at Open Phil

mike_mclaren5y2

Hi Ajeya, thanks for doing this and for your recent 80K interview! I'm trying to understand what assumptions are needed for the argument you raise in the podcast discussion on fairness agreements that a longtermist worldview should have been willing to trade up all its influence for ever-larger potential universe. There are two points I was wondering if you could comment on if/how these align with your argument.

My intuition says that the argument requires a prior probability distribution on universe size that has an infinite expectation, rather than jus

... (read more)

Ajeya

1. I agree that your prior would need to have an infinite expectation for the size of the universe for this argument to go through. 2. I agree with the generalized statement that your prior over "value-I-can-affect" needs to have an infinite expectation, but I don't think I agree with the operationalization of "value-I-can-affect" as V/n. It seems possible to me that even if there are a high density of value-maximizing civilizations out there, each one could have an infinite impact through e.g. acausal trade. I'm not sure what a crisp operationalization of "value-I-can-affect" would be.

CHOICE - Creating a memorable acronym for EA principles

mike_mclaren5y2

I have very little skin in the game here, as I don't personally have a strong desire for an acronym...but my 2 cents are that "Reasoning carefully" can be shortened to "Reasoning" (or "Reason") for this purpose with no loss - the "careful" part is implied. And I think I identify more with the idea of using careful reasoning than rationality. "Reason(ing)" also matches an existing short definition of EA as "Using reason and evidence to do the most good" (currently the page title for effectivealtruism.org)

Theory Of Change As A Hypothesis: Choosing A High-Impact Path When You’re Uncertain

mike_mclaren5y1

Thanks for the post! This is just the type of thinking I wanted to do this morning, and I'm finding it and the spreadsheet template a useful motivator.

Theory Of Change As A Hypothesis: Choosing A High-Impact Path When You’re Uncertain

mike_mclaren5y1

The given "Dive In" link is broken; I think the correct one is http://mindingourway.com/dive-in-2/

lynettebye

Thanks

Crucial questions for longtermists

mike_mclaren6y1

Thanks for your response and the link to your newer post and the Ord and Hanson refs. I'll just add a thought I had while reading

This is why I explicitly noted that here I was using MVP in a sense focused only on genetic diversity. To touch on the other "aspects" of MVP, I also have "What population size is required for economic specialisation, technological development, etc.?"

It seems fine to me for people to also use MVP in a sense referring to all-things-considered ability to survive, or in a sense focused only on e.g. economic specialisation...

... (read more)

MichaelA🔸

Yeah, that sounds right. Those factors were left out just because I didn't think of including them (because I don't know very much about these frameworks from population and conservation biology), rather than because I explicitly decided to include them, and I'd guess you're right that attending to those factors and using those frameworks would be useful. So thanks for highlighting this :) There are probably also various other "crucial questions" people could highlight, as well as questions that would fit under these questions and get more into the fine-grained details, and I'd encourage people to comment here, comment in the google doc, or create their own documents to highlight those things. (I say this partly because this post has a very broad scope, so a vast array of fields will have relevant knowledge, and I of course have very limited knowledge of most of those fields.)

Crucial questions for longtermists

mike_mclaren6y26

Thanks for writing this post! I enjoyed looking over these, many of which I have also been puzzling about.

What’s the minimum viable human population (from the perspective of genetic diversity)?

After seeing this question picked up here I thought I would share some quick thoughts from the perspective of a person with a population biology/evolution background. I think this is a reasonable question to ask, but I suspect is not as important as the other factors that go into the broader question of what is the minimum population size from which humanity is ... (read more)

MichaelA🔸

Very interesting, thanks! Strong upvoted. This matches what I had tentatively believed before seeing your comment - i.e., I had suspected that genetic diversity wasn't among the very most important considerations when modelling odds of recovery from collapse. So I've now updated to more confidence in that view. I raised MVP (from a genetic perspective) just as one of many considerations, and primarily because I'd seen it mentioned in The Precipice. (Well, Ord doesn't make it 100% clear that he's just talking about MVP from a genetic perspective, but the surrounding text suggests he is. Hanson also devotes two paragraphs to the topic, again alongside other considerations.) I'd agree that clarifying what one means is important. This is why I explicitly noted that here I was using MVP in a sense focused only on genetic diversity. To touch on the other "aspects" of MVP, I also have "What population size is required for economic specialisation, technological development, etc.?" It seems fine to me for people to also use MVP in a sense referring to all-things-considered ability to survive, or in a sense focused only on e.g. economic specialisation, as long as they make it clear that that's what they're doing. Indeed, I do the latter myself here: I write there that a seemingly important parameter for modelling odds of recovery is "Minimum viable population for sufficient specialisation to maintain industrialised societies, scientific progress, etc." I wasn't aware of these points; thanks for sharing them :)

What posts do you want someone to write?

mike_mclaren6y2

I see, thanks for the explanation!

What posts do you want someone to write?

mike_mclaren6y3

I'd be really interested in reading an updated post that makes the case for there being an especially high (e.g. >10%) probability that AI alignment problems will lead to existentially bad outcomes.

My understanding is that Toby Ord does just this in his new book The Precipice (his new AI x-risk estimate is also discussed in his recent 80K podcast interview about the book), though it would still be good to have others weigh in.

bmg

I think that chapter in the Precipice is really good, but it's not exactly the sort of thing I have in mind. Although Toby's less optimistic than I am, he's still only arguing for a 10% probability of existentially bad outcomes from misalignment.* The argument in the chapter is also, by necessity, relatively cursory. It's aiming to introduce the field of artificial intelligence and the concept of AGI to readers who might be unfamiliar with it, explain what misalignment risk is, make the idea vivid to readers, clarify misconceptions, describe the state of expert opinion, and add in various other nuances all within the span of about fifteen pages. I think that it succeeds very well in what it's aiming to do, but I would say that it's aiming for something fairly different. *Technically, if I remember correctly, it's a 10% probability within the next century. So the implied overall probability is at least somewhat higher.

Quantifying lives saved by individual actions against COVID-19

mike_mclaren6y7

This version that has been making the rounds on twitter makes the point even plainer: Flattening the pandemic curve source

The syntax for embedding images is ![alt text](url). For this and other forum formatting issues, try googling along the lines of "markdown insert image" or "markdown cheatsheet" (still what I do despite using markdown regularly)

Denkenberger🔸

I agree that if we have sustained protective measures, it would not only lower the peak but also reduce the total number of people exposed. However, I am defining a short-term action as doing something we would not normally do in the next few weeks, like canceling a conference or early travel bans. I think this would delay the peak, but it's not clear to me that the peak would be appreciably lower. Furthermore, this says there are about 60,000 full function ventilators and 160,000 total ventilators. If 10% percent of people are infected at the peak and 3% of those require ventilation, that would be 1 million requiring ventilation. So even in the US, and with moderate protective measures, it looks like most people would not be getting the ventilation they need (though lowering the peak will still help somewhat). Of course if the protective measures actually stopped the spread early, then that would be a big benefit.

Linch's Quick takes

mike_mclaren6y2

We recorded some of the talks and intend to edit + upload them, we're writing a "how to organize a conference" postmortem / report, and one attendee is planning to write a magazine article

That all sounds useful and interesting to me!

Would another post like this be helpful?

I think multiple posts following events on the personal experiences from multiple people (organizers and attendees) can be useful simply for the diversity of their perspectives. Regarding Catalyst in particular I'm curious about the variety of backgrounds of the attendees and how t

... (read more)

Linch's Quick takes

mike_mclaren6y3

Thanks for your report! I was interested but couldn't manage the cross country trip and definitely curious to hear what it was like.

Tessa A 🔸

I'd really appreciate ideas for how to try to confer some of what it was like to people who couldn't make it. We recorded some of the talks and intend to edit + upload them, we're writing a "how to organize a conference" postmortem / report, and one attendee is planning to write a magazine article, but I'm not sure what else would be useful. Would another post like this be helpful?

The Intellectual and Moral Decline in Academic Research

mike_mclaren6y2

Can you clarify the point you're trying to make with the reference to spurious correlations, Will? I don't think the author is trying to make any deep claim about causation here, but just pointing out that a growing amount of taxpayer money is wasted due to retractions. (I appreciate the point from other commenters that this is still presumably a small fraction of the total funding though and so might not be as big a concern as the author suggests.)

Will Bradshaw

Sure. Taken at face value, the claim is that taxpayer funding and number of retractions have increased over time, at rates not hugely different from one another. I think both can almost entirely be accounted for by an increase in the total number of researchers. If you have more researchers producing papers, this will result in both a big increase in funding required and in number of papers retracted without any change in the quality distribution. I would want to see evidence for a big increase in retractions per number of researchers, researcher hours or some other aggregative measure before taking this seriously as a claim that science has got worse over time. It's well-known that if you don't control for the total number of people in a place or doing a thing, all sorts of things will correlate (homicides and priests, ice-cream sales and suicides, etc.). More substantively, I also disagree with the claim that a big increase in retractions is evidence of scientific decline. Insofar as there has been any increase in the per-capita rate of retractions, I regard this as a sign of increasing epistemic standards, and think both editors and scientists are still way too reluctant to retract papers. It's like the replication crisis: the problems have always been there, but we only started paying attention to them recently. That's a good sign, not a bad one.

Concerning the Recent 2019-Novel Coronavirus Outbreak

mike_mclaren6y4

Just a note that the reproduction number can decrease for other reasons; in particular if and as the disease spreads you might expect greater public awareness, CDC guidance, travel bans, etc leading to greater precaution and less opportunity for infected individuals to infect others.

"Altruism-driven research" (EA meets... plant pathology?)

mike_mclaren6y3

Small suggestion to include the full citation at the top of the post along with the link; The article and journal titles in particular are useful context.

Garrett KA, Alcala-Briseno R, Andersen KF, Brawner J, Choudhury R, Delaquis E, Fayette J, Poudel R, Purves D, Rothschild J, Small I, Thomas-Sharma S, Xing Y. 2019. Effective altruism as an ethical lens on research priorities. Phytopathology PHYTO-05-19-0168-RVW. DOI: 10.1094/PHYTO-05-19-0168-RVW.

12 of 14 of authors (including first and last authors) are at the University of Florida and one is at Louisiana

mike_mclaren6y6

Thanks for posting this! Very interesting to see effective altruism being directly discussed in this context. I was curious whether EA had been discussed in other academic biology journals. Entering "effective altruism" into the Pubmed search bar brings up four articles,

Funding Conservation through an Emerging Social Movement. Freeling BS, Connell SD. Trends Ecol Evol. 2019 Oct 12. pii: S0169-5347(19)30276-9. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2019.09.002. [Epub ahead of print]
Impediments to Effective Altruism: The Role of Subjective Preferences in Charitable Givin

mike_mclaren6y14

After doing a 5$ practice donation, I re-examined the instructions at https://www.eagivingtuesday.org/instructions/us-500-or-more and understood you are suggesting get to the "confirm donation page" before the 8am start time. But I think if the recommendation to start the donation prior to 8am was in the "In a nutshell" section I would have figured it out sooner. You might consider editing the third sentence in the first bullet of the "In a nutshell" section to something like "We recommended starting the donation process prior to the official match start s

... (read more)

WilliamKiely🔸

Thanks for the helpful feedback, Mike! I just updated the website to improve the language based on your recommendation. Here's what I put: EDIT/UPDATE 12/2/2019: Facebook eliminated the "Confirm Your Donation" prompt this morning, so we made the following change: New version: Old version:

EA Giving Tuesday, Dec 3, 2019: Instructions for Donors

mike_mclaren6y15

It seems basically impossible to reliably execute a newly-learned many-step task within one second.

Since this also seemed hopeless to me after my test donation took me 20 seconds, I thought I'd reiterate the key part of AviNorowitz's reply even more plainly: What the EA Giving Tuesday team's instructions recommend is that you do all of the steps except the last one prior to 8AM. So you only need to do one step (a single mouse click) in one second.

Avi Norowitz

Hi Mike. Do you think we should be more clear in our language? We're recommending donating within the first second because (a) we want to emphasize the importance of speed and (b) it is plausible the match will actually end in 1 second, even though a few seconds is probably more likely. But we also don't want people to misunderstand the difficulty of this and feel hopeless.

A bunch of new GPI papers

mike_mclaren6y5

For the record, you can see all of GPI's papers at https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/papers/, and seminars by the authors presenting some of these papers can be seen on GPI's YouTube channel.

(and thanks to the OP for helping bring them to my attention!)

New study in Science implies that tree planting is the cheapest climate change solution

mike_mclaren7y9

Last week, Science published four responses to the original article,

along with a reply to the responses from the original authors,

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/eaay8108

(hat tip to the Future Perfect newsletter)

Bioinfohazards

mike_mclaren7y10

Just wanted to say thanks to both Gregory and Spiracular for their detailed and thoughtful back and forth in this thread. As someone coming from a place somewhere in the middle but having spent less time thinking through these considerations, I found getting to hear your personal perspectives very helpful.

The Germy Paradox – The empty sky: How close did we get to BW usage?

mike_mclaren7y4

The link to the previous post is broken

eukaryote

Thanks, fixed.

Countering imposter syndrome

mike_mclaren7y7

Thanks for writing this and posting it here on the forum. Beyond the helpful suggestions, I feel that both managers and those experiencing imposter syndrome need reminders that many people experience this, likely including many who they themselves view as highly competent. I imagine that imposter syndrome also affects many people not working at EA organizations but who are working towards applying to an EA org or taking another form of career move for EA reasons, especially for orgs or cause areas that are high-profile within the community. (It certainly a

... (read more)

Defining Effective Altruism

mike_mclaren7y11

As a scientist, I consider science a way of learning about the world, and not what a particular group of people say. I think the article is fairly explicit about taking a similar definition of "science-aligned":

(i) the use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out...
(...)

Science-aligned. The best means to figuring out how to do the most good is the scientific method, broadly construed to include reliance on careful rigorous argument and theoretical models as well as data.

There is usually a vast body of existing relevant work on a topic across va

mike_mclaren7y4

Reading this paper carefully actually left me feeling quite skeptical about how species population monitoring is conducted and reported. ... So the conclusions have to be pessimistic if all the studies you have to review focus on monitoring species with the highest risk of extinction.

I haven't read the paper, but did listen to a More or Less episode about the paper. The episode discusses the poor quality of the available data and left me feeling similarly. The radio episode also highlights a potential bias in search strategy used by the authors in their

... (read more)

gavintaylor7y11

Good point. I was commenting more on my perception of the conservation field rather than considering biases in the methodology of this study, but they keywords used were:

[insect*] AND [declin*] AND [survey]

Which does is completely biased to finding studies showing insect declines. Fig 1. also shows that most of the included studies were done in the US and Europe, with very little data coming from the tropics where most insect diversity is.

I find this forum increasingly difficult to navigate

mike_mclaren7y6

Regarding the breakdown by subject, I agree that this would be very valuable, but that having a bunch of subforums probably isn't the answer. To me, the obvious solution is having keyword/tag support, where authors and/or mods set the keywords for their article, and users can view all posts with a given tag. This feature is built into popular blog-building platforms like Hugo (through Hugo "taxonomies"); I have no idea how hard it would be to implement in the LW/EA forum software. But the ability to filter to posts relating to AI, wild-animal suffering, co

mike_mclaren7y18

Thanks for posting this. Posts introducing books or other bodies of work not explicitly about EA or an EA cause area, but that introduce or explain relevant ideas from disparate disciplines, seem valuable and I would like to see more.

My Q1 2019 EA Hotel donation

mike_mclaren7y5

Thanks for clarifying! Perhaps clicking the "Blog post" button could autofill a standard note for this, that one could choose to delete. That way new users will be able to understand how this works right away. (Unless the idea is to phase out / discourage / remove this feature)

My Q1 2019 EA Hotel donation

mike_mclaren7y14

+1 thanks to Vipul for writing this. But I also want to balance the second part of Aaron's comment by saying that I would like to see more posts explaining personal donations in general, and don't think that will happen if the average level of quality and time has to hit this level. Please share your donation reasonings even if you don't feel super confident about them and don't have time to make a carefully researched and written post! I had originally thought "Blog posts" would be a good venue for such less-well-crafted posts, but I see now that attempting to make a new blog post simply takes you to the new post page.

Aaron Gertler 🔸

Mike, To clarify the difference between "personal blog" and other categories: If you'd prefer not to have a post marked as "meta" or "frontpage" (and thus displayed to more people), you can leave a note at the top of the post requesting that it be left as a "personal blog" post, or message me to let me know I shouldn't add a meta/frontpage category. (I'm the Forum's lead moderator.)

SHOW: A framework for shaping your talent for direct work

mike_mclaren7y5

Regarding applying to EA organizations, I think we can simply say that the applicants are doing good by applying. Many of the orgs have explicitly said they want lots of applicants---the applicants aren't wasting the orgs' time, but helping them get better candidates (in addition to learning a lot through the process, etc).

After one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organisation

mike_mclaren7y7

~1h sounds like the time to make a CV and cover letter personalized for Charity Science starting from an at least semi-relevant CV and cover letter for a previous job application.

Joey🔸

My sense is they already had a CV that required very minimal customization and spent almost all the time on the cover letter.

After one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organisation

mike_mclaren7y43

Something that seems to be missing from this (very valuable) conversation is that many people also spend months looking for non-EA jobs that they have a personal fit for. I'm mainly aware of people with science PhDs, either applying for industry jobs or applying for professorships. It is not uncommon for this to be a months long process with multiple 10s of applications, as being reported here for EA job searching. The case of where this goes faster in industry jobs tends to be because the applicant is well established as having a key set of skills that a

mike_mclaren7y14

For the record, the AMAs were mentioned as upcoming in the New EA Funds management thread and a few-day window was given on Dec. 5 in the December quick update thread

Effective Altruism in non-high-income countries

mike_mclaren7y4

I like this idea as well. As a thread grows, it can also be useful for the OP to edit the thread to maintain a structured list of links to key posts, as in the textbook recommendation thread on LessWrong

Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities: Solutions

mike_mclaren7y1

Small suggestion: I would find it helpful if you linked to the previous post(s) in the series in the beginning and, if the forum software allows it, to make references to individual sections (such as "Section 3 argued that") to be clickable links to those sections.

kokotajlod

Good point. I put in some links at the beginning and end, and I'll go through now and add the other links you suggest... I don't think the forum software allows me to link to a part of a post, but I can at least link to the post.

Crohn's disease

mike_mclaren7y16

Interesting post, thanks for sharing. Although I am skeptical for some reasons I note below, the potential upside to such a cheap treatment for a very unpleasant disease seems highly worth pursuing. For context, I'm viewing this post as an academic biologist who develops methods for microbiome data analysis and collaborates with some clinicians, though my background is ecology and evolution rather than medicine.

While reading the post, I struck by how the referenced evidence for the author's (Martin Laurence) hypothesis is entirely from citations ... (read more)

martlau

Hi Mike, Thanks for the comments and suggestions. Several studies are currently being run with academics, but it would not be fair for me leak their results in this forum. These results will be published in due time. Replicating Samuel et al 2010 is quite expensive, and is currently beyond my means (to fund it personally). As you mentioned, the standard way to study this is to first replicate Kellermayer et al 2012, and Kanda et al 2002 in Crohn's, and Richard 2018. You can see the full list of projects which are running right now at the bottom of this page: https://www.malassezia.org/how-can-i-help Once these results are published, I think it will be possible to apply for NIH funding to replicate Samuel et al 2010. This will delay replication by 1-2 years. I am sensitive to Crohn's patients who will suffer in the interim, which is why I wanted to replicate Samuel et al 2010 earlier (if possible). I came very close to starting the replication of Samuel et al 2010 with funding from private sources, but a key philanthropist dropped out at the last minute. I have a detailed project plan from credible researchers who are willing to run this study. They told me they could not get institutional funding until Kellermayer et al 2012, and Kanda et al 2002 in Crohn's are replicated. I think they told me the truth, but perhaps not. If you think we can get NIH funding with the current level of evidence, then by all means direct me to a Crohn's research group who is willing/capable of going this route now.

Open beta of the new EA Forum now available

mike_mclaren8y1

It's not just you, I'm also unable to log in with this forum's credentials ("wrong password" error). The links to log in with Google or Github also don't seem to be functional.

joel_duplicate0.5816669276037654

Was also getting a wrong password error. Resetting it worked for me.