Suppose you want to collect some kind of data from a population, but people vary widely in their willingness to provide the data (eg maybe you want to conduct a 30 minute phone survey but some people really dislike phone calls or have much higher hourly wages this funges against).

One thing you could do is offer to pay everyone $X$ dollars for data collection. But this will only capture the people whose cost of providing data is below $X$, which will distort your sample.

Here's another proposal: ask everyone for their fair price to provide the data. If they quote you $Y$, pay them $2Y$ to collect the data with probability ${\left(\frac{X}{2Y}\right)}^2$, or $X$ with certainty if they quote you a value less than $X/2$. (If your RNG doesn't return yes, do nothing.) Then upweight the data from your randomly-chosen respondents in inverse proportion to the odds that they were selected. You can do a bit of calculus to see that this scheme incentivizes respondents to quote their fair value, and will provide an expected surplus of $max(X^2/4Y,X-Y)$ dollars to a respondent who disvalues providing data at $Y$.

Now you have an unbiased sample of your population and you'll pay at most $NX$ dollars in expectation if you reach out to $N$ people. The cost is that you'll have a noisier sample of the high-reluctance population, but that's a lot better than definitely having none of that population in your study.

(TLDR: Recent Cochrane review says zinc lozenges shave 0.5 to 4 days off of cold duration with low confidence, middling results for other endpoints. Some reason to think good lozenges are better than this.)

There's a 2024 Cochrane review on zinc lozenges for colds that's come out since LessWrong posts on the topic from 2019, 2020, and 2021. 34 studies, 17 of which are lozenges, 9/17 are gluconate and I assume most of the rest are acetate but they don't say. Not on sci-hub or Anna's Archive, so I'm just going off the abstract and summary here; would love a PDF if anyone has one.

• Dosing ranged between 45 and 276 mg/day, which lines up with 3-15 18mg lozenges per day: basically in the same ballpark as the recommendation on Life Extension's acetate lozenges (the rationalist favorite).
• Evidence for prevention is weak (partly bc fewer studies): they looked at risk of developing cold, rate of colds during followup, duration conditional on getting a cold, and global symptom severity. All but the last had CIs just barely overlapping "no effect" but leaning in the efficacious direction; even the optimistic ends of the CIs don't seem great, though.
• Evidence for treatment is OK: "there may be a reduction in the mean duration of the cold in days (MD ‐2.37, 95% CI ‐4.21 to ‐0.53; I² = 97%; 8 studies, 972 participants; low‐certainty evidence)". P(cold at end of followup) and global symptom severity look like basically noise and have few studies.

My not very informed takes:

• On the model of the podcast in the 2019 post, I should expect several of these studies to be using treatments I think are less or not at all efficacious, be less surprised by study-to-study variation, and increase my estimate of the effect size of using zinc acetate lozenges compared to anything else. Also maybe I worry that some of these studies didn't start zinc early enough? Ideally I could get the full PDF and they'll just have a table of (study, intervention type, effect size).
• Even with the caveats around some methods of absorption being worse than others, this seems rough for a theory in which zinc acetate taken early completely obliterates colds - the prevention numbers just don't look very good. (But maybe the prevention studies all used bad zinc?)
• I don't know what baseline cold duration is, but assuming it's something like a week, this lines up pretty well with the 33% decrease (40% for acetate) seen in this meta-analysis from 2013 if we assume effect sizes are dragged down by worse forms of zinc in the 2024 review.
  • But note these two reviews are probably looking at many of the same studies, so that's more of an indication that nothing damning has come out since 2013 rather than an independent datapoint.
• My current best guess for the efficacy of zinc acetate lozenges at 18mg every two waking hours from onset of any symptoms, as measured by "expected decrease in integral of cold symptom disutility", is:
  • 15% demolishes colds, like 0.2x disutility
  • 25% helps a lot, like 0.5x disutility
  • 35% helps some (or helps lots but only for a small subset of people or cases), like 0.75x disutility
  • 25% negligible difference from placebo

I woke up at 2am this morning with my throat feeling bad, started taking Life Extension peppermint flavored 18mg zinc acetate lozenges at noon, expecting to take 5ish lozenges per day for 3 days or while symptoms are worsening. My most recent cold before this was about 6 days: [mild throat tingle, bad, worse, bad, fair bit better, nearly symptomless, symptomless]. I'll follow up about how it goes!

I work on a capabilities team at Anthropic, and in the course of deciding to take this job I've spent^[1] a while thinking about whether that's good for the world and which kinds of observations could update me up or down about it. This is an open offer to chat with anyone else trying to figure out questions of working on capability-advancing work at a frontier lab! I can be reached at "graham's number is big" sans spaces at gmail.

1. ^{^}

   and still spend - I'd like to have Joseph Rotblat's virtue of noticing when one's former reasoning for working on a project changes.

So it's been a few months since SB1047. My sense of the main events that have happened since the peak of LW commenter interest (might have made mistakes or missed some items) are:

• The bill got vetoed by Newsom for pretty nonsensical stated reasons, after passing in the state legislature (but the state legislature tends to pass lots of stuff so this isn't much signal).
• My sense of the rumor mill is that there are perhaps some similar-ish bills in the works in various state legislatures, but AFAIK none that have yet been formally proposed or accrued serious discussion except maybe for S.5616.
• We're now in a Trump administration which looks substantially less inclined to do safety regulation of AI at the federal level than the previous admin was. In particular, some acceleration-y VC people prominently opposed to SB1047 are now in positions of greater political power in the new administration.
  • Eg Sriram Krishnan, Trump's senior policy advisor on AI, was opposed; "AI and Crypto Czar" David Sacks doesn't have a position on record but I'd be surprised if he was a fan.
  • On the other hand, Elon was nominally in favor (though I don't think xAI took an official position one way or the other).

Curious for retrospectives here! Whose earlier predictions gain or lose Bayes points? What postmortems do folks have?

Basically all major world currencies have a base unit worth at most 4 US dollars: 

There’s a left tail going out to 2.4e-5 USD with the Iranian rial, but no right tail. Why is that?

One thing to note is that this is a recent trend: for most of US history (until 1940 or so), a US dollar was worth about 20 modern dollars inflation-adjusted. I thought maybe people used dimes or cents as a base unit then, but Thomas Jefferson talks about "adopt[ing] the Dollar for our Unit" in 1784. 

You could argue that base units are best around $1, but historical coins (backed by precious metals) are inconvenient if small, so they couldn’t shrink enough. But if that’s true, why not make the dime the base unit then? Maybe it’s really useful to have fractional amounts of currency, or it’s unsatisfying for a base-unit coin to be too small?

Another angle is to say that base units should be large, but steady inflation pushes them down over time and it’s inconvenient to change, and a preference for similar exchange rates + a fairly stable world order means no upstart central banks to set a new standard.

This is my current best guess (along with "base units between $1 and $20 are all basically fine") but I don't feel very confident about it (and if people want to match the US dollar then why does the left tail exist?).

[cross-posted from Twitter]

A problem I have that I think is fairly common:

1. I notice an incoming message of some kind.
2. For whatever reason it's mildly aversive or I'm busy or something.
3. Time passes.
4. I feel guilty about not having replied yet.
5. Interacting with the message is associated with negative emotions and guilt, so it becomes more aversive.
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until the badness of not replying exceeds the escalating 4/5 cycle, or until the end of time.

Curious if anyone who once had this problem feels like they've resolved it, and if so what worked!