Thank you for the feedback (and also for discussing this at length which gave me better understanding of the nuances). I modified to a more clumsy but hopefully a more what-you-see-is-what-I-mean term: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mRkWTpH9mb8Wdpcn5/coronavirus-california-case-growth?commentId=GHSEwZwR2TSkyzpdm
Thank you for the feedback. I agree with Lukas Gloor's reply below that the choice of term is confusing as it differs from what people may intuitively think "true cases" means. I also agree with his remark that setting terminology that is consistent with reality isn't bad in and of itself.
I have therefore changed "true cases" to "true currently-or-eventually-symptomatic cases". I think that provides the level of precision needed for our purposes. I haven't found a better term after some searching (though not a lot); however, I'm happy to change to a more concise and medically accepted term if I get to learn of one.
What I wrote there was assuming that the number of new true cases drops to a fairly low level. Whether that happens now or a week or two or three later is unclear; if the 2 -> 3 backlog is growing. then resolving that backlog will add more delay.
I posited us already being at this point as the "optimistic" scenario.
I'll reword the post to clarify this.
Directly visiting http://foretold.io gives an ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED. Can you make it so that foretold.io redirects to www.foretold.io?
That's a normal part of life :). Any things that I decide to do in a future day, I'll copy/paste to over there, but I usually won't delete the items from the checklist for the day where I didn't complete them (thereby creating a record of things I expected or hoped to do, but didn't).
For instance, at https://github.com/vipulnaik/daily-updates/issues/54 I have two undone items.
There is some related stuff by Carl Shulman here: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QSHwKqyY4GAXKi9tX/a-personal-history-of-involvement-with-effective-altruism#comment-h9YpvcjaLxpr4hd22 that largely agrees with what I said.
My understanding is that Against Malaria Foundation is a relatively small player in the space of ending malaria, and it's not clear the funders who wish to make a significant dent in malaria would choose to donate to AMF.
One of the reasons GiveWell chose AMF is that there's a clear marginal value of small donation amounts in AMF's operational model -- with a few extra million dollars they can finance bednet distribution in another region. It's not necessarily that AMF itself is the most effective charity to donate to to end malaria -- it's just the one with the best proven cost-effectiveness for donors at the scale of a few million dollars. But it isn't necessarily the best opportunity for somebody with much larger amounts of money who wants to end malaria.
For comparison:
The main difference I can make out between the EA/GiveWell-sphere and the general global health community is that malaria interventions (specifically ITNs) get much more importance in the EA/GiveWell-sphere, whereas in the general global health spending space, AIDS gets more importance. I've written about this before: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1f9/the_aidsmalaria_puzzle_bleg/
I tried looking in the IRS Form 990 dataset on Amazon S3, specifically searching the text files for forms published in 2017 and 2016.
I found no match for (case-insensitive) openai (other than one organization that was clearly different, its name had openair in it). Searching (case-insensitive) "open ai" gave matches that all had "open air" or "open aid" in them. So, it seems like either they have a really weird legal name or their Form 990 has not yet been released. Googling didn't reveal any articles of incorporation or legal name.
In my experience, writing full-fledged, thoroughly researched material is pretty time-consuming, and if you push that out to the audience immediately, (1) you've sunk a lot of time and effort that the audience may not appreciate or care about, and (2) you might have too large an inferential gap with the audience for them to meaningfully engage.
The alternative I've been toying with is something like this: when I'm roughly halfway through an investigation, I publish a short post that describes my tentative conclusions, without fully rigorous backing, but with (a) clearly stated conclusions, and (b) enough citations and other signals that there's decent research backing my process. Then I ask people what they think of the thesis, which parts they are interested in, and what they are skeptical of. Then after I finish the rest of the investigation I push a polished writeup only for those parts (for the rest, it's just informal notes + general pointers).
For examples, see https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/ghBZDavgywxXeqWSe/wikipedia-pageviews-still-in-decline and http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1f9/the_aidsmalaria_puzzle_bleg/ (both are just the first respective steps for their projects).
I feel like this both makes comments more valuable to me and gives more incentive to commenters to share their thoughts, but the jury is still out.
I did some rewording of the post that made it a little more wordy, but fingers crossed that that part has now become less confusing.