neelnanda

Awesome! Articles like this forget that early on, "misinformation" included the idea that masks worked or that COVID was airborne. And for a shockingly long-time, the idea that COVID could have come from a lab leak.

Vaccines obviously work, and vaccine misinformation costs lives, but in order to properly censor you need an actually trustworthy source of truth, and I'm unconvinced that society is currently capable of that.

[1 Day Sooner](https://www.1daysooner.org/) is an organisation pushing for these trials, that's found 38,000 informed volunteers who would be willing to do these trials. Force is completely unnecessary, there are enough altruistic people who are willing to do trials like this

Interesting! Can you say a bit more about what you don't like about the font style, layout and color scheme?

Hey! Author of the piece here.

I somewhat disagree, I think experiments are a great way to overcome wasted motion. Sure, only 20% will succeed. But there's a major asymmetry with trying new things - you can drop the failures after trying it once, but can keep doing the successes again and again.

For example, if I want to find a new hobby, I should try lots of things. 80% will be boring and I can drop it after one session, but 20% could be incredibly fun, and worth doing for the rest of my life.

I flesh this point out in this post: https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/33-upside-risk

Hey! Author of the piece here

Thanks for the feedback, this prompted me to add an afterword to the piece about the dangers of optimising too hard.

To me there's a pretty important difference between 'it is systematically bad to do anything about inefficiency' and 'sometimes inefficiency is protecting something important'. I strongly agree with the second one, but strongly disagree with the first one. I think that, empirically, there often are free wins, such as making learning more efficient. And sometimes inefficiency and balance is important, but sometimes it's not, and the skill is telling the difference.

For example, I think leisure time is great, but this is because it's time to relax, take breaks and do what I enjoy. Not just because it's time that I spend not being productive. If I notice a bunch of time in my schedule not being productive, but also not enjoying myself, eg commuting to work, finding ways to swap that for more true leisure time is a good way to reduce wasted motion

You might enjoy a post I wrote on the importance of leaving Slack and spare capacity in your life: https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/38-slack - essentially on the importance of leaving some inefficiency, so you can be flexible and reactive, and seize new opportunities.