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What does it mean to claim that these people are contrarians?

Is there a consensus position at all? For any existing policy, you could claim that there is some kind of centrist compromise that it's a good policy, so people who propose changing policy, like Hanson and Caplan, are defying that compromise. But there is not really any explicit consensus goal of most policies, so claiming existing institutions are a bad compromise because they pursue multiple goals and separating those goals is not in defiance of any consensus. Caplan, Hanson, and Sailer are offensive because they feel we should try to understand the world and try steer it. They may be wrong, but the people opposed to them rarely offer an opposing position, but are rather opposed to any position. It seems to me that the difference between true and false is much smaller than the gap between argument and pseudoscience. Maybe Sailer is wrong, but the consensus position that he is peddling pseudoscience is much more wrong and much more dangerous.

Sailer rarely argues for genetic causes, but leaves that to the psychologists. He believes it and sometimes he uses the hypothesis, but usually he uses the hypotheses 1-4 that Turkheimer, Harden, and Nisbett concede. Spelling out the consequences of those claims is enough to unperson him. Maybe he's wrong about these, but he's certainly not claiming to be a contrarian. And people who act like these are false rarely acknowledge an academic consensus. Or compare Jay: it's very hard to distinguish genetic effects from systemic effects, so when Jay argues that racial IQ gaps aren't genetic, he is (explicitly!) arguing that they are caused by racial differences in parenting. Sailer often claims this (he thinks it's half the effect), but people hate this just as much as anything else he says. Calling him a contrarian and focusing attention on one claim seem like an attempt to mislead.

That is a very clear example, but I think something similar is going on in the rest. Guzey seems to have gone overboard in reaction to Matthew Walker's book Why We Sleep. Did that book represent a consensus? I don't know, but it was concrete enough to be wrong, which seems to me much better than an illusion of a consensus.

That they have a "real names" policy is a blatant lie.

They withhold "real names" every day, even ones so "obvious" as to be in wikipedia. If they hate the subject, such as Virgil Texas, they assert that it is a pen name. Their treatment of Scott is off the charts hostile.

If we cannot achieve common knowledge of this, what is the point of any other detail?

How about cancer deaths? From the point of view of 2012, was Beau Biden's death in 2015 after diagnosis in 2013 due to quantum randomness? That sure had a big effect on the Democratic primary, if not the general election.

Sure, but this is not new. You start by saying "AI in 2024" but this is true of everything that has been called AI and a lot of things that maybe should have been called AI, such as the PageRank algorithm. Credit scores have made decisions based on based on statistical models since the 50s.

That sounds pretty similar to sublingual therapy. I think it is likely that sublingual therapy is better because of the denser dosing (weekly vs monthly), but the difference is small enough that it can only be assessed with a head-to-head trial. (If the difference is compliance, it would be difficult to measure, though potentially very large.)

The headline that environmental allergies are curable is a decades old. If this news has not spread, it is good that you promote it, but we should ponder why it is not common knowledge.

The medical consensus is that sublingual immunotherapy is inferior to the injected immunotherapy that has been used for a century. Did you try that as a kid? If there's reason to believe sublingual is better, that's good to know, but it sounds like you just don't know about injections.

Sublingual immunotherapy has an obvious advantage because people don't like shots. And it doesn't require a prescription. Indeed, one should be suspicious of a conflict of interest in the medical consensus. But injected doses are more precisely controlled, so there is good reason to believe they work better. And the doses are smaller, so the material cost is smaller.

Compliance to the schedule may be the main obstacle. It is not obvious whether doctor appointments make this better or worse. This probably varies between people.

In the post you talked about editing all 237 loci to make diabetes negligible, but now you talk about the normal human range. I think that is more correct. Editing all 237 loci would leave the normal human range; the effect on diabetes would be unpredictable and the probability of bad effects likely. Not because of pleiotropy, but just the breakdown of a control system outside of its tested regime.

First of all, the population numbers are complete garbage. This is completely circular. You are just reading out the beliefs about history used to fabricate them. The numbers are generated by people caring about the fall of Rome. The fall of Rome didn't cause of decline in China. Westerners caring about the fall of Rome caused the apparent decline in China.

Second, there was a tremendous scientific and technological regress in Rome. Not caused by the fall of Rome, but the rise of Rome. There was a continual regress in the Mediterranean from 150BC to at least 600AD. Just look at a list of scientists: it has a stark gap 150BC-50AD. It is more controversial to say that the renaissance 50AD-150AD is a pale shadow of the Hellenistic period, but it is. In 145BC Rome fomented a civil war in Egypt, destroying Alexandria, the greatest center of learning. In 133BC, the king of Pergamon tried to avoid this fate by donating the second center of learning. It was peaceful, but science did not survive.

Since those are rare causes of deaths, they don't matter and they're hard to measure. Also, this is a small study, so I trust earlier studies more.

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