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 Bad Is QWERTY, Really? A Review of the Literature, such as It Is, published by Erich Grunewald on January 15, 2022 on LessWrong.

Some six or so years ago, not long after I had started working as a programmer, I developed a bad case of repetitive strain injury (RSI) and for a while couldn't use my left hand for typing, but had to rely on my right hand and dictation. This situation being obviously untenable, I took action: I purchased an ergonomic keyboard (Microsoft Sculpt), remapped shift to the space bar when pressed in combination with another key, started doing hand/wrist stretches and switched from typing on the QWERTY layout to Colemak. This grab bag of interventions worked, my RSI got better and, though it still flares up sometimes, I now have it under control.

I have stuck with Colemak since then and have liked it and occasionally even recommended it to friends and colleagues. But beyond reading popular articles about the topic, I never really looked into the evidence on key layouts and ergonomics[1] and productivity[2] – until now, that is!

Before we get to the good stuff, a word of caution. I am in no way an expert on this; I estimate I spent roughly 15-25 hours researching and taking notes, so there is still a lot that I'm uncertain about. My target group here is touch-typing office workers, typing mainly in English, without disabilities that significantly impede their typing (e.g. the loss of an arm or that sort of thing). For people who don't touch-type, QWERTY is probably fine. For people who have disabilities that affect their typing, I assume special considerations, of which I know little, apply.

Summary

My current model on the RSI risk is something like this. The evidence has made me update towards the risk of developing serious RSI from keyboard use being small. I had a pretty strong prior, based on what I've heard from other programmers and on my own experience, that it often causes RSI. I still think it's a risk, but not as large as I did before, though with lots of uncertainty (80% confidence interval would be 2%-20% chance of developing keyboard RSI over a lifetime for the aforementioned target group). I think key layout is a minor part of the ergonomic harms of keyboard use; keyboard type (i.e. ergonomics of design) and posture/positioning both seem more important (70% confidence).

As for productivity, compared to e.g. Dvorak or Colemak, QWERTY seems somewhat slower for typing on the margin (80% confidence). But most people, and most programmers even, don't type enough that switching would result in a significant productivity boost (80% confidence).

In general, the QWERTY layout, while undoubtedly suboptimal, doesn't seem as bad as I had thought previously. If you are interested in making the switch and don't mind the transaction cost, you might see small benefits on the margins; if not, don't bother.

QWERTY – Designed to Be Slow?

Here is an anecdote recounted by Michael Tiemann, expressing a commonly held belief:

One weekend I visited Richard Stallman at MIT and I was shocked to learn that he could no longer type. He was given strict instructions by his doctor to not touch a computer keyboard for 6-12 months, and that if he did, he may lose forever his ability to type. He was a programming pioneer, and at the time, his symptoms were not well known or understood. We all came to understand that it was RSI – repetitive stress injury, exacerbated by the very keystroke combinations that made the Emacs editor such a powerful programming environment. But the root cause was not Emacs – it was the [punitive] design of the QWERTY keyboard, a legacy of the industrial era when complex keyboard mechanisms were not able to keep up with the speed of human fingers. The solution? Design a keyboard so confounding and unnatural that no human could ever outrun...

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: [linkpost] Peter Singer: The Hinge of History, published by michaelchen on January 16, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

This is a crosspost of Peter Singer's "The Hinge of History", published in Project Syndicate on October 8, 2021.

The dangers of treating extinction risk as humanity’s overriding concern should be obvious. Viewing current problems through the lens of existential risk to our species can shrink those problems to almost nothing, while justifying almost anything that increases our odds of surviving long enough to spread beyond Earth.

PRINCETON – Twelve years ago, during the International Year of Astronomy that marked the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first use of a telescope, I wrote “The Value of a Pale Blue Dot” – a reflection on how astronomy has revealed a vast universe filled with an unimaginable number of stars, thus shrinking the significance of our sun and our planet. The “pale blue dot” refers to how the Earth appears in a 1990 photograph taken by the Voyager spacecraft as it reached the outer limits of our solar system. The essay suggests that the knowledge gained from astronomy “forces us to acknowledge that our place in the universe is not particularly significant.”

A recent blog post by Holden Karnofsky has led me to reconsider that thought. Karnofsky is co-CEO of Open Philanthropy, a foundation that researches the best opportunities for philanthropic grant-making, and publishes the reasons for its decisions. Thinking about the long-term significance of today’s philanthropic decisions is therefore part of Karnofsky’s role. He is thinking very long term indeed.

Karnofsky points out that we could be living “at the very beginning of the tiny sliver of time during which the galaxy goes from nearly lifeless to largely populated.” That “tiny sliver of time” began, we might say, with the first use of tools by our ancestors, around three million years ago. It will end when our descendants – who might be digital minds, rather than biological organisms – inhabit the entire galaxy, perhaps ushering in a civilization consisting of an enormous number of conscious beings that would last for tens of billions of years. There is a good chance, Karnofsky argues, that this process of populating the galaxy will begin during this century. By 2100, we could develop the technology to construct self-sufficient settlements on other planets.

This thought echoes one expressed in 2011 by the late philosopher Derek Parfit, who wrote, near the end of the second volume of On What Matters: “We live during the hinge of history.” Like Karnofsky, Parfit was thinking of the arrival of technologies that, if used wisely, would enable our species to survive “its most dangerous and decisive period,” and our descendants to spread through our galaxy. Parfit refers to “the next few centuries,” rather than just this one, as the time it may take before humans can live independently on other planets, but even that will be only be a sliver of time compared to what is to come. Our most significant contribution to this development would be to ensure the survival of intelligent life on our planet.

Perhaps, though, the idea that we are essential to this process is merely the latest version of the self-important delusion that humans are the center of existence. Surely, in this vast universe, there must be other forms of intelligent life, and if we don’t populate the Milky Way galaxy, someone else will.

Yet, as the physicist Enrico Fermi once asked fellow scientists over lunch at Los Alamos National Laboratory, “Where is everybody?” He wasn’t commenting on empty tables in the lab’s dining room, but on the absence of any evidence of the existence of extraterrestrials. The thought behind that question is now known as the Fermi Paradox: if the universe is so stupendous, and has existed for ...

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: Long covid: probably worth avoiding—some considerations, published by KatjaGrace on January 16, 2022 on LessWrong.

I hear friends reasoning, “I’ll get covid eventually and long covid probably isn’t that bad; therefore it’s not worth much to avoid it now”. Here are some things informing my sense that that’s an error:

A. Really bad anecdotes aren’t hard to find.

I asked for people’s long-covid experiences on Twitter and got more than a hundred comments mostly full of truly awful stories, almost entirely from people I don’t know at all, presumably somehow brought via the active Long Covid community.

This is a bit hard to interpret as a datum, due to the intense selection effects involved, but my main inferences are:

The bad tail gets very bad.

This bad tail is less like a quantitative reduction in labor, and more like psychological torment, being very sleep deprived or brain damaged while dealing with a host of legitimately scary health problems (see below) than I had been picturing.

The very bad part of the bad tail is not tiny. Like, if I requested lightning strike experiences, I don’t think I would get this kind of response.

See this for more heavily selected but still scary anecdotes about what bad cases can look like.

B. Bad anecdotes are common enough to show up in my vicinity.

Among this cascade of terrible stories is a response from one of the handful of people from my extended network who I already knew had had covid, Oxford machine learning professor Michael Osborne. I take this as strong evidence that that level of bad experience isn’t vanishingly rare, though he has been well for the last few months, so this is only direct evidence of this kind of thing happening for about two years.

Excerpts from his account:

My own low-points: early on, I collapsed, shaking, and was taken to A&E in an ambulance. A year later, I did not have the energy to leave the house. Formerly, I was a marathon runner, but I brought on a bad relapse with a 700m walk. Many people have it much, much, worse. 2/

Michael A Osborne (@maosbot) October 19, 2021

Brain fog is a bit like being extremely sleep-deprived—remember, sleep deprivation is literally a technique of torture—but you can't sleep off brain fog. It feels like being lost in a fog, sensing dark shapes shifting around you, losing yourself. 6/

Michael A Osborne (@maosbot) October 19, 2021

"Fatigue" similarly does no justice to the experience. Fatigue means there is less of you. You are less. You can't, just can't, get out of bed. This is not psychological (although fatigue may cause depression!). Your body, physically, does not have the energy. 7/

Michael A Osborne (@maosbot) October 19, 2021

(Another distant relative in my generation just told me that they have long covid, but I take that as much less evidence, since I only know about them having covid at all because they saw this long covid discussion.)

C. Rates of ambiguously-maybe-quite-bad symptoms seem very high, even for people who only had mild covid

This norwegian study, n = 70k, has, for mild cases (in a sample mixing people who had covid 1-6 months prior with people who had it 11-12 months prior):

10.2% with fatigue (6.4% higher than control in the 11-12 months case),

7.1% with poor memory (3.5% higher than previous control),

9.2% with brain fog (5.3% higher than previous control).

6.9% with shortness of breath (5.6% higher than previous control)

These numbers are for unvaccinated people; I’d maybe reduce them by a factor of two for being vaccinated, deferring to Matt Bell, who reasons, “A very recent report from the UK claims that full vaccination cuts the risk of lingering symptoms 28+ days after catching COVID by roughly half”.

This meta-analysis of 81 studies finds:

“Approximately 1 in 3 individuals experienced fatigue 12 or more weeks following COVID-19 diagnosis...

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: Trying to Keep the Garden Well, published by clearthis on January 16, 2022 on LessWrong.

I used to live in city-subsidized housing. It was an apartment complex with a big garden.To enjoy the garden in the summer, residents started putting old chairs and a table outside. Once summer was over, they didn't bother to take them inside again. The table became weathered and didn't offer a pleasant sight anymore.The city noticed and put up a letter on the apartment board saying that having your own furniture in the garden was unorderly and threatened that any furniture that wasn't removed from the garden by the end of the month would be disposed of.

(You might want to quickly think about the long-run effects this letter had.)

In the following weeks, the residents dumped their old sofas, broken beds, televisions and, what-not into the garden. Normally, disposing of large items like this required you to have a car, drive the items to a disposal yard and pay a fee. However, the city had just made it free.

Or so the residents thought.

Of course, the city didn't think of following through with their threat anymore. Removing a couple of chairs and a table would have fit in a normal workday of a city janitor. Removing this pile of trash would have been costly.

The months went on, the sofas were wet, nobody used the garden anymore.I moved away soon after.

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: Personal blogging as self-imposed oppression, published by xarkn on January 15, 2022 on LessWrong.

You Should Start a Blog Right Now!

Or should you? You can find some blog posts about the benefits of blogging but I can't think of many that explore the potential harms. I can think of some reasons why blogging — especially under your real identity — could waste your time, make you a worse thinker, and limit your social and professional opportunities.

1. Blogging will give society more influence over your thinking.

Imagine if any stranger off the street could come and visit your home. How would that change your behavior? Probably you would make sure there is nothing offensive or too personal around, and you'd spend more time making your home look neat and presentable, with your shelves lined with books you feel give a good impression of yourself. A personal blog is like opening a public door to your mind. Do you really think that you won't clean up the contents for the sake of public appearances?

2. It will enforce your current beliefs and identity.

Writing about your beliefs and claims in public will make those a stronger part of your identity. They will stay as obstacles before adopting new views and information, because you have to reconcile the new with your newly-questionable but previously proud content. If you instead keep your thoughts and beliefs anonymous, you can accept all the new information you want without worrying about your old digital garden misleading the public or causing embarrassment.

Learning you were wrong about something:

No blog --> Update your beliefs.

Yes blog --> Update your beliefs, and all relevant blog posts.

3. It will make your beliefs visible.

If you write about X, people will know what you think of X. This will matter if X is or becomes controversial, and may limit your social and professional opportunities. You will lose opportunities with some people who strongly disagree with you on X. The first impression will already have been made before you meet.

Maybe you write about rationalist views, and your hippie friend will be just barely enough put off that you won't get an invite to their summer parties. Or you have a nice uncle you'd like to spend more time with, but their father was a butcher and you wrote essays about veganism.

If you instead had kept your thinking to yourself, you'd have an easier time reaching out to people you might enjoy as friends, even if you disagree on some important ideas.

4. It might make you less interesting.

The more you've written about yourself and your beliefs, the less room there is for other people to learn about you. This seems especially relevant in dating, where you'll be regrettably often perceived as boring if your life is too open. The less of your story you've published, the more room you have to try different ways to interact with people, even if it's just about how exactly you tell others about your life story or beliefs.

When your life story so far is out there, already authored, that's mostly what you'll get. When it's a mystery, you build it together with the people you spend time with. Maybe in some relationships, this process of mutually learning about each others' values and stories is an important process, where you adapt to each other and build a stronger shared bond?

5. Blogging will twist your motivation and demand your time.

If you want to achieve anything in this world, what other people think of you will matter. Maybe you started a blog to improve your writing and thinking, but as soon as you put your real name on a site, you will feel pressure to build and polish it in order to improve how others perceive you.

A blog will reveal significant information that others will try to use for judging your quality. You'll be compared to other bloggers in quality and quantity, and even t...

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: [Linkpost] [Fun] CDC To Send Pamphlet On Probabilistic Thinking, published by Gunnar Zarncke on January 14, 2022 on LessWrong.

CDC Announces Plan To Send Every U.S. Household Pamphlet On Probabilistic Thinking

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: Hear This Idea - Mike on Nuclear Winter and ensuring mid to long term food security, published by Michael Hinge on January 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

I'm Michael Hinge, a Senior Economist at ALLFED (The Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters), an EA non profit where we spend our time thinking about food shocks and how we might be able to feed everyone, no matter the disaster. This ranges across the spectrum of immediate action (climate change triggering variable yields, locusts and other pests devastating crops) all the way up to longer term threats bordering on existential (nuclear winter, asteroids, supervolcanos).

As part of ALLFED's work on preparing for a loss of sunlight, we are close to finalising and submitting a paper which outlines an integrated model looking at food availability in a severe nuclear winter. This looks at stocks being carried into the disaster, the range of potential resilient foods that could be produced and when they may arrive, the nutrition profile of the post catastrophe diets and the affordability of foods to the world's poorest. The code will be published as open source alongside the paper, and can be expanded as new ideas for food production become available.

I recently recorded a podcast with Lucca Righetti and Finlay Moorhouse at the Future of Humanity Institute discussing all this and more, and please do check it out if you're interested in food security, nuclear winter and our work in general. It was really interesting to talk with them both, they were great hosts, and food security seems to be typically less well known within the EA community compared to other risks and threats.

In addition, ALLFED has recently secured funding from the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF), and we are looking to expand the team, both for volunteers and full time paid researchers. Due to the nature of our work we require a huge range of skills and backgrounds, including but not limited to:

Project managers

Engineers (of many types)

Economists and political scientists

Programmers/data scientists (GIS experience is gold dust)

Please check the jobs portal link out if you're interested, and I hope you enjoy the podcast.

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: Look For Principles Which Will Carry Over To The Next Paradigm, published by johnswentworth on January 14, 2022 on LessWrong.

In 1918, Emmy Noether published her famous theorem showing that each symmetry of the laws of physics implies a corresponding conserved quantity. Laws which remain the same even if we move the whole universe left or right a little result in conservation of momentum, laws which remain the same over time result in conservation of energy, and so forth.

At the time, Noether’s Theorem was only proven for the sorts of systems used in classical physics - i.e. a bunch of differential equations derived by minimizing an “action”. Over the next few decades, the foundational paradigm shifted from classical to quantum, and Noether’s original proof did not carry over. But the principle - the idea that symmetries imply conserved quantities - did carry over. Indeed, the principle is arguably simpler and more elegant in quantum mechanics than in classical.

This is the sort of thing I look for in my day-to-day research: principles which are simple enough, fundamental enough, and general enough that they’re likely to carry over to the next paradigm. I don’t know what the next paradigm will be, yet; the particulars of a proof or formulation of a problem might end up obsolete. But I look for principles which I expect will survive, even if the foundations shift beneath them.

Examples In My Own Work

My own day-to-day research focuses on modelling abstraction.

I generally build these models on a framework of probability, information theory, and causal models. I know that this framework will not cover all of abstraction - for example, it doesn’t cover mathematical abstractions like “addition” or “linearity”. Those abstractions are built into the structure of logic, and probability theory takes all of logic as given. There may be some way in which the abstraction of linearity lets me answer some broad class of questions more easily, but standard probability and information theory ignore all that by just assuming that all pure-logic questions are answered for free.

. yet I continue to use this probability/information/causality framework, rather than throwing it away and looking for something more general on which to build the theory. Why? Well, I expect that this framework is general enough to figure out principles which will carry over to the next paradigm. I can use this framework to talk about things like “throwing away information while still accurately answering queries” or “information relevant far away” or “massively redundant information”, I can show that various notions of “abstraction” end up equivalent, I can mathematically derive the surprising facts implied by various assumptions. For instance, I can prove the Telephone Theorem: when transmitted over a sufficiently long distance, all information is either completely lost or arbitrarily perfectly conserved. I expect a version of that principle to carry over to whatever future paradigm comes along, even after the underlying formulations of “information” and “distance” change.

Why Not Just Jump To The Next Paradigm?

One obvious alternative to looking for such principles is to instead focus on the places where my current foundational framework falls short, and try to find the next foundational framework upfront. Jump right to the next paradigm, as quickly as possible.

The main reason not to do that is that I don’t think I have enough information yet to figure out what the next paradigm is.

Noether’s Theorem and principles like it played a causal role in figuring out quantum mechanics. It was the simple, general principles of classical mechanics which provided constraints on our search for quantum mechanical laws. Without those guideposts, the search space of possible physical laws would have been too wide.

Speci...

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 questions relevant to EA could be answered by surveying the public?, published by David Moss on January 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Examples of questions that have previously been raised on the Forum, which seem like they could be answered (or significantly informed) by surveys of the general public include:

Should we rebrand "effective altruism"? How do people respond to the term "effective altruism"?

How many people in different populations have heard of "effective altruism"?

Are younger people more future-oriented (or longtermist)?

How does receptiveness to effective altruism vary with age? Are high school students more or less receptive to EA than undergraduates?

Note that by referring to "the public" I mostly intend to rule out things like surveying effective altruists or elite policy-makers. I don't intend to rule out things like surveying current students or highly educated young professionals. Surveying graduates of elite universities would be an edge case.

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: Survey supports ‘long covid is bad’ hypothesis (very tentative), published by KatjaGrace on January 14, 2022 on LessWrong.

I wanted more clues about whether we live in a world where really bad long covid outcomes are vanishingly rare (but concentrated a lot in my Twitter) or in a world where for instance a large fraction of ‘brain fogs’ reported are anything like the horrors sometimes described. I went to Positly, hoping that a randomish sample of people who want my money would answer.

I hope to write something more careful about this survey soon, especially if it is of interest, but figure the basic data is better to share sooner. This summary is not very careful, and may e.g. conflate slightly differently worded questions, or fail to exclude obviously confused answers, or slightly miscount.

This is a survey of ~200 Positly survey takers, all between 20 and 40 years old. Very few of the responses I’ve looked at seem incoherent or botlike, unlike the survey I did around the time of the election.

Results

Have you had covid?

Yes: 57

No: 151

Unsure: 22

Do you seem to have ongoing health problems after recovering from acute covid illness?

Yes: 12 out of 57 = 21%

Are you currently working less as a result of the covid pandemic?

“Yes, because I had covid and it left me with ongoing problems with physical or mental health” - about 6 tick this, though often in conjunction with other yes explanations.

=> 10% rate of people apparently working less at least partly due to Long Covid, among those who’ve had covid

(Also, here is an example of someone responding that they work just as much as before:

‘I am a registered nurse, so I am around a lot of COVID. The lingering symptom that has been the worst is the fatigue. I feel like I am never rested. It actually lead to a car accident because I fell asleep driving after the second round of COVID.’

Finding good questions is tricky - in a bad enough situation everyone might be doing very badly and yet look more productive due to necessity.)

Agreement with a list of checkable statements about their lives

8 people unambiguously checked boxes agreeing with statements that sounded especially brutal to me (they could check as many as they wanted from a longer list including less brutal things):

I feel substantially cognitively damaged

I am unable to walk up stairs without resting

I am less markedly able to think clearly, more than half the hours of the day

My life is miserable

(I’m tentatively not including people who seemed to give conflicting answers in different places, though maybe some will make sense on further inspection)

This seems to be 8/57 = 14% rate of brutal covid outcomes, though at least some of these are probably very recent - I haven’t filtered things out by when they got covid, though I did ask them (I’m hoping to go to sleep very soon).

How much do your ongoing health problems from covid reduce your capacity to do things you would have normally done in a day?

Only given to the 12 people who said they had ongoing health problems.

Answers:

Average: 46% reduction

Median: 37% reduction

People citing less than 30% reduction: 1

For people with ongoing health issues, given a choice of A) ‘be rid of ongoing covid related health issues and symptoms forever’ or B) an increase in income this year:

For 10% increase in income:

6 would take health, 3 income, 2 N/A

For 50% increase in income:

3 would still take health, 3 would take income

For 200% increase in income:

1 still prefers health, 2 would take income

##Questions just given to people who didn’t have covid, about people they know:

How many people do you know who had covid at least two months ago and survived?

How many of them are less than 40 years old?

How many of those people (under 40 years old, survived covid at least two months ago) seem to be having longer term health probl...