Bucky

# Posts

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The (Unofficial) Less Wrong Comment Challenge

Some authors have stated their preferences on this (generally such comments are marginally positive but stating one specific thing you liked is a big improvement).

Pain is the unit of Effort

A great example of advice reversal

FWIW I suspect I personally need this advice more than alkjash's advice. I've always had a feeling that most people are doing it wrong (e.g. managers who are always working late instead of learning to delegate) but I'm conscious that I want to be better at committing to things and seeing them through even if they're hard (or just inconvenient!).

Bucky's Shortform

I was confused as to why they did this too - alternative guesses I had were to increase number of available doses or to decrease side effect severity.

However the site you link to has been updated with a link to Reuters who quote AstraZeneca saying it was an accident - they miscalculated and only noticed when side effects were smaller than predicted.

Bucky's Shortform

Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine effectiveness

(numbers from here and here, numbers inferred are marked with an asterisk)

Some interesting results from the latest vaccine trial. The treatment group was split in two, one of which received 2 full doses of the vaccine, the other received a half dose followed by a full dose (separated by a month in both cases).

• In the control group there were 101 COVID infections in ~11,600* participants.
• With 2 full doses there were 28* infections in 8,895 participants.
• In the half first dose condition there were 2* infections in 2,741 participants.

So does having a low first dose actually improve the immune response?

The best I can figure out the evidence is 8:1 Bayes factor in favour of the "low first dose better" hypothesis vs the "It doesn't matter either way" hypothesis.

Not sure what a reasonable prior is on this but I don't think this puts the "low first dose is better" hypothesis as a strong winner on posterior.

On the other hand the evidence is 14:1 in favour of "it doesn't matter either way" vs "both full doses is better" so at the moment it probably makes sense to give a half dose first and have more doses in total.

I'll be interested as to what happens as the data matures - the above is apparently based on protection levels 2 weeks after receiving the second dose.

The Mutant Game - Rounds 11 to 30
• Bots were passed their own previous move and told it was their opponent's previous move.
• Bots were always given 0 as the round index instead of the correct positive integer.

I was wondering what the second mistake was - I notice that I am no longer confused :)

Originally I was confused in this game as to why CliqueZviBot started decreasing around round 23 but I guess it is a combination of:

• getting 300-200 against a_comatose_squirrel, incomprehensibot and KarmaBot which have become a smaller part of the pool.
• getting 200-300 against A Very Special Bot, Clone wars, episode return 3 and EarlyBirdMimicBot which are becoming a larger part of the pool

(not all of them but probably most, especially the first bullet)

The central limit theorem in terms of convolutions

I enjoyed this and had the same experience that when I was taught CLT referring to random variables I didn’t have a proper intuition for it but when I thought about it in terms of convolutions it made it a lot clearer. Looking forward to the next post.

The Darwin Game - Rounds 21-500

One interesting graph would be the average points gained per matchup vs round number which would give a good indication of cooperation level and what kinds of strategies would work. It can kind of be inferred from the bots which are left but seeing a graph would make it easier to picture.

The Darwin Game - Rounds 21-500

I have a theory that ASTB might end up helping EBMB somewhat too as some of ASTB's mass goes to the clones which keeps them alive for longer for EBMB to feed off. Still most should go straight to MB so you'll get the bigger boost, just probably not enough.

The Darwin Game - Rounds 21-500

In the true game with AbstractSpyTreeBot, MeasureBot is going to be eating it at the same time I'm eating the clones, but is it going to be a boost as extreme as this?

Embedded Interactive Predictions on LessWrong

Do predictions resolve? (I guess just by the question author)