LW - Monthly Roundup #18: May 2024 by Zvi

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Monthly Roundup #18: May 2024, published by Zvi on May 14, 2024 on LessWrong.
As I note in the third section, I will be attending LessOnline at month's end at Lighthaven in Berkeley. If that is your kind of event, then consider going, and buy your ticket today before prices go up.
This month's edition was an opportunity to finish off some things that got left out of previous editions or where events have left many of the issues behind, including the question of TikTok.
Oh No
All of this has happened before. And all of this shall happen again.
Alex Tabarrok: I regret to inform you that the CDC is at it again.
Marc Johnson: We developed an assay for testing for H5N1 from wastewater over a year ago. (I wasn't expecting it in milk, but I figured it was going to poke up somewhere.)
However, I was just on a call with the CDC and they are advising us NOT to use it.
I need a drink.
They say it will only add to the confusion because we won't know where it is coming from. I'm part of a team. I don't get to make those decisions myself.
Ben Hardisty: The usual institute, or did they have a good reason?
Marc Johnson: They say it would only add to the confusion since we don't know precisely where it is coming from. But then they said 2 minutes later that they aren't sure this isn't just regular influenza appearing late. We can answer that, so why don't we??? I don't get it.
Alex: Are your team members considering bucking the CDC advice or has the decision been made to acquiesce? I understand them not wanting panic but man if that's not self serving advice I don't know what is.
Marc Johnson: The CDC will come around.
ZzippyCorgi11: Marc, can private entities ask you to test wastewater around their locations? Is the CDC effectively shutting down any and all testing of wastewater for H5N1?
Marc Johnson: No, if people want to send me wastewater I can test them with other funding. I just can't test the samples I get from state surveillance.
JH: This is ridiculous. Do it anyway!
Marc Johnson: It's not my call. I got burned once for finding Polio somewhere I wasn't supposed to find it. It fizzled, fortunately.
Ross Rheingans-Yoo: It's a societal mistake that we're not always monitoring for outbreaks of the dozen greatest threats, given how cheap wastewater testing can get.
Active intervention by the CDC to stop new testing for a new strain of influenza circulating in mammals on farms is unconscionable.
I strongly agree with Ross here. Of all the lessons to not have learned from Covid, this seems like the dumbest one to not have learned. How hard is 'tests help you identify what is going on even when they are imperfect, so use them'?
I am not so worried, yet, that something too terrible is that likely to happen. But we are doing our best to change that.
We have a pattern of failing to prepare for such easily foreseeable disasters. Another potential example I saw today would be the high-voltage transformers, where we do not make them, we not have backups available and if we lost the ones we have our grid plausibly collapses. The worry in the thread is primarily storms but also what about sabotage?
Oh No: Betting on Elections
I am proud to live in an information environment where 100% of the people, no matter their other differences, understand that 'ban all prediction markets on elections' is a deeply evil and counterproductive act of epistemic sabotage.
And yet that is exactly what the CFTC is planning to do, with about a 60% chance they will manage to make this stick.
Maxim Lott: This afternoon, the government bureaucrats at the CFTC announced that they plan to ban all election betting (aka "prediction markets on elections", aka "event contracts") in the United States. They will also ban trading on events in general - for example, on who will win an Oscar.
The decision was 3-2, with the ...