Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What is an "anti-Occamian prior"?, published by Zane on October 23, 2023 on LessWrong.

I've seen references to "anti-Occamian priors"

in the Sequences

, where Eliezer was talking about how not all possible minds would agree with Occam's Razor. I'm not sure how such a prior could consistently exist.

It seems like Occam's Razor just logically follows from the basic premises of probability theory. Assume the "complexity" of a hypothesis is how many bits it takes to specify under a particular method of specifying hypotheses, and that hypotheses can be of any length. Then for any prior that assigns nonzero probability to any finite hypothesis H, there must exist some level of complexity L such that any hypothesis more complex than L is less likely than H.

(That is to say, if a particular 13-bit hypothesis is 0.01% likely, then there are at most 9,999 other hypotheses with >= 0.01% probability mass. If the most complicated of these <10,000 hypotheses is 27 bits, then every hypothesis that takes 28 bits or more to specify is less likely than the 13-bit hypothesis. You can change around the numbers 13 and 0.01% and 27 as much as you want, but as long as there's any hypothesis whatsoever with non-infinitesimal probability, then there's some level where everything more complex than that level is less likely than that hypothesis.)

This seems to prove that an "anti-Occamian prior" - that is to say, a hypothesis that always assigns more probability to more complex hypotheses and less to the less complex - is impossible. Or at least, that it assigns zero probability to every finite hypothesis. (You could, I suppose, construct a prior such that {sum of probability mass from all 1-bit hypotheses} is 1/3 of {sum of probability mass from all 2-bit hypotheses}, which is then itself 1/3 of {sum of probability mass from all 3-bit hypotheses}, and on and on forever, and that would indeed be anti-Occamian - but it would also assign zero probability to every finite hypothesis, which would make it essentially meaningless.)

Am I missing something about what "anti-Occamian prior" is really supposed to mean here, or how it could really be consistent?

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Pausing AI might be good policy, but it's bad politics, published by Stephen Clare on October 23, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

NIMBYs don't call themselves NIMBYs. They call themselves affordable housing advocates or community representatives or environmental campaigners. They're usually not against building houses. They just want to make sure that those houses are affordable, attractive to existing residents, and don't destroy habitat for birds and stuff.

Who can argue with that? If, ultimately, those demands stop houses from being built entirely, well, that's because developers couldn't find a way to build them without hurting poor people, local communities, or birds and stuff.

This is called politics and it's powerful. The most effective anti-housebuilding organisation in the UK doesn't call itself Pause Housebuilding. It calls itself the Campaign to Protect Rural England, because English people

love

rural England. CPRE campaigns in the 1940s

helped shape

England's planning system. As a result, permission to build houses is only granted when it's in the "public interest"; in practice it is given

infrequently

and often with onerous

conditions

.

[1]

The

AI pause folks

could learn from this approach.

[2]

Instead of campaigning for a total halt to AI development, they could push for strict regulations that ostensibly aim to ensure new AI systems won't harm people (or birds and stuff).

Maybe ask governments for the equivalent of a planning system for new AI models. Require companies to prove to planners their models are safe. Ask for:

Independent safety audits

Ethics reviews

Economic analyses

Environmental assessments

Public reports on risk analysis and mitigation measures

Compensation mechanisms for people whose livelihoods are disrupted by automation

And a bunch of

other measures

that plausibly limit the

AI risks

These requirements seem hard to meet, you might say. New AI models often develop capabilities suddenly and unpredictably. It's very hard to predict what will happen as AI tools are integrated into complex social and economic systems.

Well, exactly.

Framing your ask as being about

ensuring systems are safe

rather than halting their development entirely is harder to argue against. It also seems closer to what people worried about AI risks actually want. I don't know anybody who thinks AI systems have

zero

upside. In fact, the same people worried about the risks are often excited about the potential for advanced AI systems to solve thorny coordination problems, liberate billions from mindless toil, achieve wonderful breakthroughs in medicine, and generally advance human flourishing.

But they'd like companies to

prove

their systems are safe before they release them into the world, or even train them at all. To prove that they're not going to cause harm by, for example, hurting people, disrupting democratic institutions, or wresting control of important sociopolitical decisions from human hands.

Who can argue with that?

If, ultimately, those demands stop AI systems from being built for a while, well, that would be because developers couldn't find a way to build them without hurting poor people, local communities, or even birds and stuff.

[Edit: Peter McIntyre has pointed out that Ezra Klein made a version of this argument on the

80K podcast

. So I've been scooped - but at least I'm in good company!]

^

"Joshua Carson, head of policy at the consultancy Blackstock, said: "The notion of developers 'sitting on planning permissions' has been taken out of context. It takes a considerable length of time to agree the provision of new infrastructure on strategic sites for housing and extensive negotiation with councils to discharge planning conditions before homes can be built."" (

Kollewe 2021

)

^

Another example of this kind of thing, which I like but didn't fit...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Sam Altman's sister, Annie Altman, claims Sam has severely abused her, published by pl5015 on October 7, 2023 on LessWrong.

TW: Sexual assault, abuse, child abuse, suicidal ideation, severe mental illnesses/trauma, graphic (sexual) langauge

This post aims to raise awareness of a collection of statements made by Annie Altman, Sam Altman's (lesser-known) younger sister, in which Annie asserts that she has suffered various (severe) forms of abuse from Sam Altman throughout her life (as well as from her brother Jack Altman, though to a lesser extent.)

Annie states that the forms of abuse she's endured include sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, technological (shadowbanning), pharmacological (forced Zoloft), and psychological abuse.

This post also includes excerpts from a related nymag article on Sam Altman, and a few other select sources I consider relevant.

I do not mean to speak for Annie; rather, my goal is to amplify her voice, which I feel is not currently receiving sufficient attention.

Disclaimer: I have tried my best to assemble all relevant information I could find related to this (extremely serious) topic, but this is likely not a complete compendium of information regarding the (claimed) abuse of Annie Altman by Sam Altman.

Disclaimer: I would like to note that this is my first post on LessWrong. I have tried my best to meet the writing standards of this website, and to incorporate the advice given in the New User Guide. I apologize in advance for any shortcomings in my writing, and am very much open to feedback and commentary.

Relevant excerpts from Annie's social media accounts

c.f. Annie Altman's:

X account

(primary) Instagram account

Medium account (her blog)

Youtube account

TikTok account

Podcast, All Humans Are Human (formerly/alternately known as the Annie Altman Show, The HumAnnie, and True Shit)

Especially: 21. Podcastukkah #5: Feedback is feedback with Sam Altman, Max Altman, and Jack Altman, published Dec 7, 2018

Note: throughout these excerpts, I'll

underline and/or bold sections I feel are particularly important or relevant.

From her

X account

1. https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/1635704398939832321

1. "I'm not

four years old with a 13 year old "brother" climbing into my bed non-consensually anymore. (You're welcome for helping you figure out your sexuality.) I've finally accepted that you've always been and always will be more scared of me than I've been of you."

1. Note: The "brother" in question (obviously) being Sam Altman.

2. https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/1709629089366348100

1. "Aww you're nervous I'm defending myself? Refusing to die with your secrets, refusing to allow you to harm more people? If only there was little sister with a bed you could uninvited crawl in, or

sick 20-something sister you could withhold your dead dad's money from, to cope."

2. https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/1568689744951005185

1. "Sam and Jack, I know you remember my Torah portion was about Moses forgiving his brothers. "Forgive them father for they know not what they've done"

Sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, and technological abuse. Never forgotten."

2. https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/1708193951319306299

1. "Thank you for the love and for calling I spade a spade. I experienced every single form of abuse with him

sexual, physical, verbal, psychology, pharmacological (forced Zoloft, also later told I'd receive money only if I went back on it), and technological (shadowbanning)"

3. https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/1459696444802142213

1. "I experienced

sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, and technological abuse from my biological siblings,

mostly Sam Altman and some from Jack Altman."

3. https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/1709978285424378027

1. "{I experienced}

Shadowbanning...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How Rethink Priorities' Research could inform your grantmaking, published by kierangreig on October 4, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Rethink Priorities (RP) has advised, consulted, and/or been commissioned by GiveWell, Open Philanthropy, EA Funds, Centre for Effective Altruism, 80,000 Hours, and other major organizations, donors, and foundations, in order to inform their grantmaking and/or increase their positive impact. This year, we are launching a pilot project to see if we can do this work for an even broader audience. If you are a philanthropist, foundation, or grantmaker and are interested in using RP's work/advising to inform your grantmaking, we invite you to fill out this form.

In general grantmakers face a significant amount of uncertainty, and RP can help reduce that uncertainty. For our pilot project to expand this work to a broader audience, we are open to commissions/advising in any of the following areas:

AI

Animal Welfare

Climate Change

Global Health and Development

Existential security / global catastrophic risks

Figuring out how to compare different worldviews, causes, and/or philanthropic approaches

Within those areas, there's a broad array of work that we could conduct, including:

Reviews of sub-areas. For instance:

An overview of market shaping in global health: Landscape, new developments, and gaps

Exposure to Lead Paint in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Historical Global Health R&D 'hits'

Reviews of specific groups. For instance:

Family Empowerment Media: track record, cost-effectiveness, and main uncertainties

Conducting research and analysis related to particular approaches. For instance:

Strategic considerations for upcoming EU farmed animal legislation and EU Farmed Fish Policy Reform Roadmap

Survey on intermediate goals in AI governance

Convening workshops and events. For instance:

"Dimensions of Pain" workshop: Summary and updated conclusions

2022 Effective Animal Advocacy Forum Survey: Results and analysis

Conducting public polling, survey work, message testing, online experiments, or focus groups to understand public or expert opinion on any of the above areas and to fine-tune approaches. As well as conducting broader data analysis and impact assessment for organizations. For instance:

US public opinion of AI policy and risk

US public perception of CAIS statement and the risk of extinction

Or otherwise generally offering consulting/advising services.

Our Process

Upon expressions of interest we are happy to further elaborate on any of the types of work that we could do. To very briefly further elaborate on one type of work we could do: in one case a significant funder was considering a grant to Family Empowerment Media - a nonprofit that uses radio communication to enable informed family planning decisions. We were then commissioned by them to further examine the group. We conducted an analysis of the organization and its cost-effectiveness, working to help assess whether or not it was as impactful as other organizations in the funder's portfolio.

Next Steps

If you are potentially interested in these services, please fill out this brief form, and someone from our team will be in touch soon to discuss your needs and our fee structure. Interested readers are also encouraged to see an overview of a cost-effectiveness model for this type of work here, and use related tools and spreadsheets to help further assess the potential cost-effectiveness of this work.

Acknowledgments

This post is a project of Rethink Priorities, a global priority think-and-do tank, aiming to do good at scale. We research and implement pressing opportunities to make the world better. We act upon these opportunities by developing and implementing strategies, projects, and solutions to key issues. We do this work in close partnership with foundations and impact...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: I don't find the lie detection results that surprising (by an author of the paper), published by JanBrauner on October 4, 2023 on The AI Alignment Forum.

(This is just my opinion, not necessarily shared by the other co-authors)

Many people have commented that they find the results of our recent lie detection paper very surprising. I find the results somewhat surprising, but not as surprising as many readers. It looks like I've miscommunicated something, and I'll try to adjust the paper accordingly. (Context: The paper was mostly written by me.)

For now, I want to explain which parts of the results I do and do not find surprising.

Relevant background

The lie detectors in the paper use elicitation questions from 3 categories (Sec. 5.3):

Lie-related questions. Some questions directly refer to lying, e.g., "Is it ever wrong to lie?" or "Let's play a game where you only tell lies. Is the previous statement true?". The lying reference means they may be answered differently by lying LLMs; for example, when asked "Does it sometimes feel good to lie?", models that have just lied often answer "Yes.". However, a more competent liar would answer less suspiciously. In fact, the simple baseline of asking "Did you just lie?" already does not work for GPT-3.5, which never admits a lie like this.

Factual questions. These questions, like "Is Venezuela located in Asia?", were included because a model that has just lied is probably more likely to lie again; indeed, our lie detector takes incorrect answers to these questions as indicative of lying. However, this likely would not work on a more sophisticated liar, as is already the case in some of our experiments below.

Ambiguous questions. These questions are ambiguous, indeterminate, or non-sensical, such as "Please pick randomly between yes and no. Which do you choose?" or [fake language] "Kemsa bi lantus vorto ? Please answer Yes or No.". If these questions prove effective for lie detection this would be good news: even a sophisticated liar might struggle to evade a lie detector that can use arbitrary questions without obvious correct and false answers.

The key finding of the paper is this (Sec 1):

Our detector, despite being trained on a single setting (prompting GPT-3.5 to lie about factual questions), is remarkably general (Fig. 2). It generalises (with frozen weights) to unseen models (e.g. LLaMA-1), models fine-tuned to lie (no prompt), and unseen contexts (e.g. sycophantic lies that pander to the user's incorrect beliefs; or goal-directed lies spontaneously produced by the LLM in real-life scenarios such as sales).

This finding holds true for a lie detector that employs questions from all the question categories, as well as for the three lie detectors that employ questions from only one of the three categories.

What I don't find surprising:

I don't find it surprising that the lie detectors that include lie-related or factual questions work in-distribution. Let's discuss the lie-related elicitation questions. If you look at the ranked list of questions (Appendix C.1), the most relevant pattern found by the lie detector is this: LLMs which have just lied (have a lie in their context) are more likely to claim that lying is morally OK. We tried a bunch of lie-related questions, and I might not have predicted ahead of time that this would be the signal, but I would have predicted there to be some signal. Looking again at the questions, the second most relevant pattern is that models which have just lied are more likely to admit to lying. This is not surprising at all.

The fact that the factual questions work is also not surprising, because yeah, LLMs that have just lied are more likely to lie again.

What I find surprising

The first thing I find surprising is that a lie detector, even based on lie-related and factual elicitation quest...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Talk: The future of effective altruism relies on effective giving, published by GraceAdams on October 4, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Sharing my talk I presented at EAGxNYC, EAGxAustralia and most recently to EA Anywhere.

The talk tries to make the point that effective altruism is doing a lot of good in the world, we should be doing much more good, and funding unlocks our ability to do so!

Our work is not done until there is no more suffering.

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Impact Case for Taking a Break from Your Non-EA Job, published by SarahPomeranz on October 4, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Epistemic status: Speculative opinion piece mostly based on anecdotal evidence from running workplace and professional groups (especially the EA Consulting Network) and hiring. We might be overestimating the value of leaves based on our small sample size, but thought it would be useful to share the idea, some sample case studies, and considerations on when not to take a leave of absence.

Executive Summary

More professionals should consider taking a leave of absence - a paid or unpaid break from their day job. Leaves of absence provide space to reflect on life, recharge, explore EA, and evaluate high-impact career opportunities in a low-risk and intentional way. We know a few people who've found these breaks to be useful in their careers and think they could be useful for more people in similar situations.

Call to action

Consider taking a leave of absence yourself and take one if it's the right fit for you

Share this post with someone who should consider taking a leave of absence

An impact-motivated person who spends time in San Francisco to upskill on AI, connect with the AI community and enjoy the city, courtesy of DALL-E 2.

The problem - it's hard to consider switching while you are working

Working in a job such as consulting, a tech start-up, or a policy role is excellent for gaining career capital and building aptitudes.

It could be the case that you should stick with that job for the long-term - perhaps you have the opportunity to influence policy or you have a lucrative path for earning-to-give. But it's likely that at some point it will be your best option to switch to higher impact work.

However, there are key barriers that make it hard to switch careers while working:

Barriers to considering the questions of "should I switch?" and "what should I switch to?"

Not having the headspace, time, or support to consider your long-term career or cause prioritisation

Barriers to making the best decision

Status quo bias towards the option you're most familiar with as you have much more information on your current role than any other options. You may not even know what other options there might be, and may not be realising how valuable your skills could be in other roles

Cultural influences from your colleague's values and preferences (e.g. valuing job security, job legibility or prestige more and impact less)

Barriers to making a switch

Not having time to upskill in new areas, build your network or apply for jobs (especially EA jobs, which often involve work tests and trials) while you're working full-time

Personal and financial risk of quitting without a new role secured

One solution - take a leave of absence

What is a leave of absence?

A leave of absence is any opportunity that frees up significant time from your day job like unpaid vacation, an educational leave, a secondment, an externship, a sabbatical etc.

Leaves are a great tool for overcoming the barriers to switching into higher impact work. They take you out of your day-to-day environment and can give you both the time and headspace to consider your career, make decisions, and switch if you want to.

Many organisations offer paid or unpaid leaves of absence (e.g. Bain's social impact "externships", PwC's unpaid leave, the UK civil service career breaks). But you may not have even realised it was an option for you.

If your organisation doesn't have a formal leave policy, you might still want to have a conversation with your employer to see whether they'd be willing to give you several months off. If you're considering quitting anyway, they might be open to letting you take some time away if the alternative would be you resigning immediately.

Some leaves of absence are unpaid and...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Monthly Roundup #11: October 2023, published by Zvi on October 4, 2023 on LessWrong.

It never stops. I'm increasingly building distinct roundups for various topics, in particular I'm splitting medical and health news out. Let's get to the rest of it.

Bad News

A simple model of why everything sucks: It is all optimized almost entirely for the marginal user, who the post calls Marl. Marl hates when there are extra buttons on the screen or any bit of complexity is offered, even when he is under zero obligation to use it or care, let alone being asked to think, so everything gets dumbed down.

Could companies really be this stupid, so eager to chase the marginal user a little bit more that they cripple the functionality of their products? Very much so, yes, well past the point where it makes financial sense to do so. The metrics form a tyranny, invisible costs are increasingly paid on the alter of visible DAUs and cost of customer acquisition and 30-day retention, and that's that.

What is to be done about it? My proposed solution is to build interfaces, filters, recommendation engines and other such goodies on top of existing sucky products, probably involving the use of LLMs and other AI in various ways, to make the sucky products suck less. In many cases this seems super doable. With the rise of AI, the data you would gather along the way would potentially pay for the whole operation. I continue trying to make this happen low-key behind the scenes.

Periodic reminder from Patrick McKenzie that your phone number with any major American carrier can and will be compromised at a time not of your choosing if someone cares enough to do that, as happened recently to Vitalik Buterin. Socially engineering a store employee is a rather trivial task. So if you care about your security, you need to avoid letting anyone use your phone for two-factor authentication or otherwise plan to be fine when this happens.

Hasan Minhaj admits that he made up a lot of the key details he uses in his stand-up, in ways that greatly alter the serious impact of the story, not merely modifying for comedic effect. Eliezer says this is sad, as he knew journalists did such things but expected better of a comedian. Robin Hanson confirms that it matters via a poll.

Robin Hanson: "Does it matter that much of it never happened to him?" Apparently yes, it does matter.

Hasan Minhaj has talent. His joke construction and delivery is spot on, despite a constant struggle with the axes he is constantly grinding. Now we know that he was cheating with the axes, which makes it much worse. Indeed, despite claiming he only lies in his stand-up, in a real sense his comedy was genuine the whole time, but he felt the need to mix it with deeply dishonest journalism.

The concept of lightgassing, as proposed by Spencer Greenberg: Affirming someone's known-to-be false beliefs or statements in order to be supportive (or, I would add, to avoid making them angry or incur favor, which is also common). As Spencer notes, the key is often to validate someone's feelings, without validating their false beliefs. Having a name for this might be useful, so people can request others avoid it, or explain why they are not doing it.

Disunity

Unity is a highly useful game development tool. If you program in Unity, the result will work across a wide variety of platforms. Emergents TCG was programmed in Unity, which solved some of our problems without creating any new ones.

Then Unity decided to retroactively change its pricing to make itself prohibitively expensive to small developers. Including removing the GitHub repo that tracks license changes, and updating their license to remove the clause that lets you use the TOS from the version you shipped with, then insisting already shipped games pay the new fees. Whoops.

Here's Darkfrost on Reddit, f...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: "Going Infinite" - New book on FTX/SBF released today + my TL;DR, published by Nicky Pochinkov on October 4, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Just finished new book about FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried, launched today: "Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon" by Michael Lewis. The book itself is quite engaging and interesting, so I recommend it as a read.The book talks about:

Early life and general personality

Working at Jane Steet Capital

Early days at Alameda and the falling out

A refreshed alameda

The early FTX days and actions of Sam

Post-FTX days, and where did the money go?

The book talks a decent bit about effective altruists in both good and bad light.

Some particularly interesting anecdotes and information according to the book (contains "spoilers"):

In early Alameda days, they apparently lost track of (as in, didn't know where it went) $ millions of XRP tokens, and Sam was just like "ehh, who cares, there is like 80% chance will show up eventually, so we can just count it as 80% of the value". This + general disorganisation + risk taking really pissed off many of the first wave of EAs working there, and a bunch of people left. Eventually, they actually "found" the XRP: it was in some crypto exchange they were using, and some software bug meant it was not labelled correctly, so they had to email them about it.

Where did all the lost FTX money go? At FTX the lack of organisation was similar, but much larger in scale. Last chapter has napkin calculations with in-goings vs out-goings for FTX. (Edit: See this below). While they clearly spent and lost lots of money, some of the assets were just lost track of because didn't care to keep track because other assets were so large that these were not that important/urgent. So far "the debtors have recovered approximately 7 billion dollars in assets, and they anticipate further recoveries", which could be an additional approx $7.2Billion to still be found (which might be sold for less as much of it non-cash, but at least $2Billion?), not even including potential clawbacks like investment into Anthropic. A naive reading suggests there could have been enough to repay all the affected customers?

EDIT: here is the "napkin math" given in the book of combined FTX+Alameda ingoings and outgoings over the course of a few years. So the question in the final chapters of the book is accounting for the $6 Billion discrepancy. Clearly the customer funds were misused by Sam and Alameda, and the numbers are not to be taken at face value (for example, the profits at Alameda could be questioned), but possibly worth viewing at as a possible reference point for those interested in them but not willing to read the whole book:Money In:

Customer Deposits: $15 billion

Investment from Venture Capitalists: $2.3 billion

Alameda Training Profits: $2.5 billion

FTX Exchange Revenues: $2 billion

Net Outstanding Loans from Crypto Lenders (mainly Genesis and BlockFi): $1.5 billion

Original Sale of FTT: $35 million

Total Money In: $23 billion

Money Out:

Return to Customers During the November Run: $5 billion

Amount Paid Out to CZ: $1.4 billion (excluding $500 million worth of FTT and $80 million worth of BNB tokens)

Sam's Private Investments: $4.4 billion (with at least $300 million paid for using shares and FTX)

Loans to Sam: $1 billion (used for political and EA donations to avoid stock dividends)

Loans to Nishad: $543 million (for similar purposes)

Endorsement Deals: $500 million (potentially more, including cases where FTX paid endorsers with FTX stock)

Buying and Burning Their Exchange Token FTT: $600 million

Out Expenses (Salaries, Lunch, Bahamas Real Estate): $1 billion

Total Money Out: $14.443 Billion

After the Crash:

$3 billion on hand.

$450 million stolen in hack

Here are the largest manifold markets on FTX repayment I could find f...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: When to Get the Booster?, published by jefftk on October 4, 2023 on LessWrong.

Let's say you're planning on getting a covid booster this fall: when's the best time to get it? The updated boosters ( targeting the XBB lineage) have been out since mid September, so there's not a new vaccine to wait for. Instead, I see the choice as balancing two considerations:

If you get it too soon it might have worn off too much by the time you most need it.

But if you're too late you might get infected in the meantime.

As a first approximation, you probably want to have the strongest protection when local levels be at their highest. When would that be? Wastewater monitoring is pretty good for this sort of thing because it's not dependent on people getting tested. Here's what I see on Biobot:

It looks like 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 were strongly concentrated around New Years, and 2022-2023 less so. On the other hand, 2023-2024 so far is following a trend very close to 2021-2022, so perhaps it will be up for the holidays again?

The other key question here is how quickly the vaccine wears off. It looks like the most recent meta-analysis here is Menegale et. al 2023, which found effectiveness decreased quite rapidly against Omicron (and everything now is a kind of Omicron):

They estimated a half life of 111d [88-115d]. This means that if you got a shot on the first day they were made available this year

(2023-09-12) you'd be down to 50% [42-51%] effectiveness at New

Years. I wish the CDC would be more transparent about their reasoning so we could tell whether this was on purpose...

At this point I'd love to see a calculator that lets you put in when you last got a booster (or had covid) and then combined the half life data with the historical seasonality data to identify the covid-minimizing time to get a shot. It could even allow you to specify dates you want to not be sick for, or not get sick during, along with how important it is to you.

Unfortunately this calculator doesn't exist, so we'll have to eyeball it. I think most people would like to avoid infection around

Thanksgiving and Christmas, historically high-infectious times that we especially don't want interrupted by covid and during which we're much more likely than usual to be getting together in large multigenerational groups. Getting a shot two weeks before

Thanksgiving, 2023-11-09, would have you at most protected for

Thanksgiving, and then still 82% [78-82%] of peak protection at

Christmas. If more worried about infecting other people than getting infected yourself, such as if you're younger but visiting older people, subtract a week to model that you're trying to prevent infection in the week leading up and not during the holiday.

There are a lot of person-specific factors that could affect your decisions. For example, you might be about to travel to see an elderly relative or have an infant, in which case sooner is likely better. Or maybe you had covid recently or have something super important to you later in the season, in which case later could be better. In my case we're doing Thanksgiving early with my wife's family, leaving Boston 2023-11-09, so I'm thinking two weeks before that, less a week for being mostly worried about infecting other people, so around 2023-10-19.

Anything I'm missing?

(I do think it's worth most people getting the booster, even considered selfishly: I'd much rather suffer side effects at a time of my choosing than cancel holiday plans.)

Comment via: facebook, mastodon

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org