"Applied Rationality Training Regime" #2: Searching for Bugs

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January 2, so I go on to Training Regime Day 2: Searching for bugs where the idea is to look for problems, presumably problems to be rational about but at any rate problems large or small: "In CFAR terminology, a bug is something that systematically goes wrong in your life." And this turns out to be a useful exercise, at least useful in that I hadn't thought enough about how the bugs in my life tend to group together. (And I'd always thought the term started with the dead moth that Hopper's group found after WWII, but it seems Edison was using it in the 1870s.)

  I look over at the kitchen sinks: two of them, small, at right angles to each other in a corner; one tap swivels over either sink and we usually have a dishcloth set on the tap so it can dry out. A long list of things that bug me, just a little bit each day, starts to pour out and then I just think "kitchen layout not well-suited for the current users' workflow." (Most of the time we've lived here has been pandemic time, or we'd have remodelled it already.) So I can list things individually, and I do (not here), but I prefer to think of that as one bug; our use is not the designed-for use and the usability of the kitchen therefore declined when we moved here eighteen months ago, even apart from a couple of physical points of deterioration (knobs, trash bin holder, a couple of hinges.) And yes, it bugs me. (It's possible that the kitchen was badly designed in the first place, but I prefer to think of it as a deterioration; the designer was thinking of something, after all.)

 I look at the messy desk where this laptop mostly sits (except that right now it's on a laptop stand in the hearth-room near the gas-insert fire, which is on) and I realize that the disorganization I see has been a major bug since childhood.... but I can at least see this as an infestation of same-species bugs in workroom (including shelves), garage, entryway, basement, shed, and back to the kitchen. Bug genus entropicus, species itemsOutOfOrderii, and a variety of varieties within that species.

The disorder bug becomes a productivity-failure bug, when I can't (easily) find the items I was going to write about, or when I can't (easily) find the tools or even the glue I was about to use, and so on. My T-shirt saying "organized people are just too lazy to look for things" is a reminder, but I've never fixed this. Aging has not made me more disorganized but it has made it harder to compensate; I can't hold as many items in my head at once as I could forty years ago, and I have less energy to waste. Are those separate bugs? I'd say that I'm getting symbiotic bug-pairs: entropy/mess critters are now coordinating more with entropy/decrepitude critters. It's still all about entropy.

Then there are other bugs of aging, for me and my wife and our little doggie too; my joints ache the way you'd expect for someone who has lost more than two inches in height.  Things work pretty well, except when they don't. I try to compensate with an hour's exercise each morning and with dietary adaptations and supplements and so forth, and this brings out other bugs that live on within the processes of compensation. I have multi-focal glasses, but mostly I do better with one fairly strong pair that I'm using now and an even stronger pair that I pull out for small print, but things don't get better and eventually they get worse. It's all about entropy, and it bugs me many times a day.

 There are items that would be bugs for other people; I'm a geek, and I think of myself as lacking in executive function, social awareness, and so on. Most of the time, for me these are features rather than bugs; it's just the way I always have been, and I like me just fine most of the time. Not always. But I guess things don't qualify as bugs for me unless I'm aware of them crawling around and getting in the way of my current goals.

  But the main bugs for this past year would be misjudgment bugs. For example, I did not expect the disruption of toilet paper supply, and I still don't really understand it: why didn't the businesses which suddenly couldn't use toilet paper, and had people who couldn't go to work, try to make a very little bit of money by redistributing their supply? I assume there's a good reason, but maybe not: maybe it was a regulatory barrier that just stayed up. I don't think I was sufficiently cynical about the WHO, FDA, CDC, Dr. Fauci etc. I suppose I was cynical enough about Trump, since I didn't believe his statements had truth-value to begin with, but back in early March when the Official Word was that masks don't work and you shouldn't be wearing them, I assumed there was a good evidentiary basis for that Word. And so on through the year. As Megan McArdle put it in the Washington Post,

The World Health Organization told us travel bans don’t work, apparently because they harm tourist economies; then we were told masks don’t work, apparently because experts worried that hoarding them would leave health-care workers without personal protective equipment; the public health community fell suddenly silent about the dangers of large gatherings during the George Floyd protests; a presentation to a government advisory committee actually described thousands of potential additional deaths as “minimal” compared with pursuing racial and economic equity; Anthony S. Fauci admitted he’d been lowballing his estimates of the point at which we’ll reach herd immunity.

Well I hadn't been believing Fauci for a while at that point; he does not seem to have credibility as a value, so he has none with me....but I don't understand him. I would like to understand him. There's a sort of model that Scott Alexander proposes, that I want to believe and do partly believe, in A Failure, But Not Of Prediction. Speaking of masks:

Common sense said that they worked. But there weren’t many good RCTs.
We couldn’t do more, because it would have been unethical to deliberately
expose face-mask-less people to disease. In the end, all we had were
some mediocre trials of slightly different things that we had to extrapolate
out of range.

Just like the legal term for “not proven guilty beyond a reasonable
doubt” is “not guilty”, the medical term for “not proven to work in
several gold-standard randomized controlled trials” is “it doesn’t
work” (and don’t get me started on “no evidence”). So the CDC said
masks didn’t work.

 I want to believe that, but it doesn't quite work for me, apart from the challenge-trial rejection which I reject (and I want to understand that mindset). The CDC was saying simultaneously that mask wearing doesn't work, and that health care workers need the masks. That bugs me quite a bit.

 More generally, I still don't have a good model of the "Very Serious People" who assure us that challenge trials are unethical -- it's ethical to forbid people to volunteer to save lives (on net) by risking their own? Since when? I don't even know how to think about that. I was just reading Scott Aaronson's "Distribute the vaccines NOW!" post, which lists the objection and gives the obvious-to-me reply:

5. Human challenge trials wouldn’t have provided much information, because you can’t do challenge trials with old or sick people, and because covid spread so widely that normal Phase III trials were perfectly informative. Actually, 1DaySooner had plenty of elderly volunteers  and volunteers with preexisting conditions. It bothers me how the impossibility of using those volunteers is treated like a law of physics, rather than what it is: another non-obvious moral tradeoff. Also, compared to Phase III trials, it looks like challenge trials would’ve bought us at least a couple months and maybe a half-million lives.

And that bugs me. It bugs me a lot, because I'm just not understanding. I'd have started with setting up challenge trials back in January (Wuhan closed down on Jan 23, and we'd already seen that it was present in the US....and we already had a vaccine, though that's far from the only thing to test. I wanted variolation trials, to begin with, back when I didn't know we already had a vaccine, and I'd have advocated for them anyway: if we know that variolation cases tend to be very mild, then we can be much happier to test vaccines. But I'd have said right off that "here's an alpha test, if it works out we'll have a beta test and then a gamma test and then announce public distribution, but anybody can sign up even for the alpha test if they want to and pass a quiz to show informed consent and can find a spot (i.e., a shot, and a room where you can get gradually increasing variolation exposures) available." If this is irrational, then I admit I'm still irrational; I still think that most of the pandemic so far, and all of it that may follow with a possibly-much-more-contagious strain, was avoidable from the beginning. And this bugs me a lot. (I described my own (fragment of a) healthcare plan way back when... I'd change some things, of course, and I wasn't thinking about the sort of crash Project that would be justified by a pandemic, but I think the principles are the same.)

Well, maybe this just shows the degeneration of an aging geek's brain; maybe it's all entropy after all. Today should surely be recognized generally as Entropy Day: it's the birthday of Rudolf Clausius who came up with the idea, and noted:

1. The energy of the universe is constant.
2. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum. 

 It's also the birthday (as he celebrated it) of Isaac Asimov, who in his own favorite story (and mine, back when my ABCs were Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Delany, Ellison... ... ... Zelazny) asked The Last Question: "How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?" And perhaps it's worthy of note that it's the 118th birthday of Kane Tanaka, who has been fighting entropy longer than anybody else currently on this planet. And spends every afternoon studying math.

Hmm...I'm not sure I did very well on day#2, but it doesn't bug me very much. I think I've learned a bit, and I guess I've identified some things that will presumably come up in later days, if I get that far. So it goes.