I find this comment super interesting because

a) before, I would have expected many more people to be scared of being eaten by piranhas on LessWrong and not the EA Forum than vice versa. In fact, I didn't even consider that people could find the EA Forum more scary than LessWrong. (well, before FTX anyway)

b) my current read of the EA Forum (and this has been the case for a while) is that forum people like when you say something like "People should value things other than impact (more)" and that you're more likely to be eaten by piranhas for saying "People should value impact more" than vice versa.

Take this a slight nudge towards posting on the EA Forum perhaps, although I don't really have an opinion on whether 2) and 3) might still be true.

edit: We're sorted :)

Hello, I'm Chi, the friend, in case you wanna check out my LessWrong, although my EA forum account probably says more. Also, £50 referral bonus if you refer a person we end up moving in with!

Also, we don't really know whether the Warren Street place will work out but are looking for flatmates either way. Potential other accommodation would likely be in N1, NW1, W1, or WC1

Hi, thanks for this comment and the links.

I agree that it's a pretty vast topic. I agree that the questions are personalized in the sense that there are many different personal factors to this question, although the bullets I listed weren't actually really personalized to me. One hope I had with posting to LessWrong was that I trust people here to be able to do some of the "what's most relevant to include" thinking, (e.g.: everything that affects ≥10% of women between 20 and 40 + everything that's of more interest on LessWrong than elsewhere (e.g. irreversible contraception)) I agree it's a tall order though.

For talking to my doctor: I found my experience of talking to doctors pretty frustrating to be honest. I think I've learned much more about contraception (including about where my doctors were misinformed) via the internet or friends than doctors. I don't doubt that there are excellent doctors out there, but it's difficult to find them. The advice with looking up people who wrote up medical guidelines seems solid.

That being said, while I'm interested in the topic myself, I was mostly thinking that it would be good for the LessWrong/EA community to have a reliable source. (I'm mostly constrained to hormonal contraception and have already tried out a couple, so my remaining search space is relatively small.) I think it could save lots of women many hours of research into which contraception to take + productivity loss from trying out or permanently choosing suboptimal contraception.

You prompted me to try out the D-Mannose, thanks! I've had it lying around, but was always to inert to research whether it actually works, so never bothered to take it.

Sorry for replying so late! I was quite busy this week.

• I initially wanted to commission someone and expected that I'd have to pay 4 digits. Someone suggested I put down a bounty. I'm not familiar with putting bounties on things and I wanted to avoid getting myself in a situation where I feel like I have to pay the full amount for
  • work that's poor
  • work that's decent but much less detailed than I had envisioned
  • multiple reports each
• I think I'm happy to pay the full amount for a report that is
  • transparent in its reasoning, so I can trust it,
  • tells me how much to trust study results, e.g., describes potential flaws and caveats for the studies they looked at,
  • roughly on the level of detail that's indicated by what I wrote under "the type of content I would like to see included". Ideally, the person writing wouldn't treat my list as a shopping list, but use their common sense to include the things I'd be interested in
  • the only report of this type that claims the bounty
• The first two are the most important ones. (And the last one is weird) If It's much less detailed, but fulfills the other criteria, I'd still be happy to pay triple digit.
• As you're later comment says, I think this is a pretty complex topic, and I can imagine that £2000 wouldn't actually cover the work needed to do such a report well.

I think before someone seriously puts time into this, they should probably just contact me. Both to spare awkward double work + submissions. And to set expectations on the payment. I'll edit my post to be clearer on this.

Thanks! I felt kind of sheepish about making a top-level post/question out of this but will do so now. Feel free to delete my comment here if you think that makes sense.

I would like if there was a well-researched LessWrong post on the pros and cons of different contraceptives. - Same deal with a good post on how to treat or prevent urinary tract infection, although I'm less excited about that.

• I'd be willing to pay some from my private money for this to get done. Maybe up to £1000? Open to considering higher amounts.
• It would mostly be a public service as I'm kind of fine with my current contraception. So, I'm also looking for people to chip in (either to offer more money or just to take some of the monetary burden off me!)

Examples of content that I would like to see included:

• Clarity on the contraception and depression question. e.g. apparently theory says that hormonal IUDs should give you less depression risk than pills, but in empirical studies it looks like it's the other way around? Can I trust the studies?
• Some perspective on the trade-offs involved. E.g. maybe I can choose between a 5% increased chance of depression vs. a 100% increased chance of blood clots. But maybe basically no one gets blood clots anyway, and then I'd rather take the increased blood clot risk! But because the medical system cares more about death than me, my doctor will never recommend me the blood clot one, or something like that.
• If there wasn't already a post on this (but I think there is), info on that it's totally fine to *not* take 7 day pill breaks every months, but that you can just take the pill all the time. (Although I think it might be recommended to take a short break every X months)
• Some realistic outlook on how much pain and effects on menstruation I should expect
• Various potential benefits from contraceptives aside from contraception
• On the UTI side: Is the cranberry stuff a myth or is it a myth that it's a myth or is it a myth that it's a myth that it's a myth?

Alternatively: If there actually already are really good resources on this topic out there, please let me know!

Thanks! I already mention this in the post, but just wanted to clarify that Paul only read the first _third/half (wherever his last comment is) in case people missed that and mistakenly take the second half at face value.

Edit: Just went back to the post and noticed I don't really clearly say that.

Hey, thanks for the question! And I'm glad you liked the part about AGZ. (I also found this video by Robert Miles extremely helpful and accessible to understand AGZ)

This seems speculative. How do you know that a hypothetical infinite HCH tree does not depend the capabilities of the human?

Hm, I wouldn't say that it doesn't depend on the capabilities of the human. I think it does, but it depends on the type of reasoning they employ and not e.g. their working memory (to the extent that the general hypothesis of factored cognition holds that we can successfully solve tasks by breaking them down into smaller tasks.)

HCH does not depend on the starting point (“What difficulty of task can Rosa solve on her own?”)

The way to best understand this is maybe to think in terms of computation/time to think. What kind of tasks Rosa can solve obviously depends a lot on how much computation/time they have to think about it. But for the final outcome of HCH, it shouldn't matter if we half the computation/time the first node has (at least down to a certain level of computation/time) since the next lower node can just do the thinking that the first node would have done with more time. I guess this assumes that the way the first node would benefit from more time would be making more quantitative progress as opposed to qualitative progress. (I think I tried to capture quality with 'type of reasoning process'.)

Sorry, this answer is a bit rambly, I can spend some more time on an answer if this doesn't make sense! (There's also a good chance this doesn't make sense because it just doesn't make sense/I misunderstand stuff and not just because I explain it poorly)

Copied from my comment on this from the EA forum:

Yeah, that's a bit confusing. I think technically, yes, IDA is iterated distillation and amplification and that Iterated Amplification is just IA. However, IIRC many people referred to Paul Christiano's research agenda as IDA even though his sequence is called Iterated amplification, so I stuck to the abbreviation that I saw more often while also sticking to the 'official' name. (I also buried a comment on this in footnote 6)

I think lately, I've mostly seen people refer to the agenda and ideas as Iterated Amplification. (And IIRC I also think the amplification is the more relevant part.)

I agree that it's very not ideal and maybe I should just switch it to Iterated Distillation and Amplification :/