This is a special post for quick takes by CarolusRenniusVitellius. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Remarks on the Slow Boring post about "Kritiks" in debate, copied here for a friend who wanted to reference them, and lightly edited to fit the shortform format:
In the format of debate I do ("British Parliamentary" (BP), also my favorite, having also done "Public Forum"), this sort of thing is sorta-kinda explicitly not allowed. Ironically, I think BP is somewhere where this would be most appropriate - because you don't have the 'motion' until 15 minutes prior to start, focus on ground-facts is low (only relatively, compared to other research-heavy styles); you spend a lot of time arguing about "moral weighing-criteria" and "framing" and things like this.
We do have a pretty clear line where you can, say, go full-Marxist in saying some particular impact is the most important - you have to defend this framing, not just assert "Marxism says X" - but you definitely can't tell the motion to go fuck itself. (A late-debate reframing is called a "squirrel" and only allowed if the opening-half was batshit insane with the framing).
Specifically, you pretty much can get away with saying "zoos are anthropocentric and that's bad because...", but then you have to justify that and "weigh it out" against the other cases people bring. That is, you can win with a case that would be Kritik-adjacent (i.e. radical but you still can't challenge the motion), but you then have to argue why that's the relevant framing of the debate, why it's the most important thing, etc.
I only know EU debate for BP, so it's possible its just that US debate as a whole is weird, but I don't think so since I've seen e.g. Princeton compete. In the slow-boring article they note that its worst in "Policy" debate which sounds reasonable since that's always been the most Goodharted format (I've heard of classes where they teach you to speak at 350 WPM). Also worth noting that I never debated at an especially high level, and only in the Netherlands, but I've watched a few world-finals debates and some online workshops and nothing Kritik-flavored has come up.
I find BP is actually one of the best antidotes to Twitter hot-takes, in part I'd guess because framing etc. is an integral part of the debate anyways, so what would be Kritik "flip-the-table" BS in Policy can be (is required to be) much more productive in BP. Perhaps this is the structure of the format, but it may also just be the community.
(I was the one who asked Charles to write up his inside view, as reading the article is the only serious information I've ever gathered about debate culture https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-critical-theory-is-radicalizing )
The Immune System as Anti-Optimizer
We have a short list of systems we like to call "optimizers" — the market, natural selection, human design, superintelligence. I think we ought to hold the immune system in comparable regard; I'm essentially ignorant of immunobiology beyond a few YouTube videos (perhaps a really fantastic LW sequence exists of which I am unaware), but here's why I am thinking this.
The immune system is the archetypal anti-optimizer: it defends a big multicellular organism from rapidly evolving microbiota. The key asymmetry:
- Specified once by the genome. It cannot rewrite its own source code between generations. Its adversaries evolve orders of magnitude faster.
- Resource asymmetry as counterbalance. Whole organs are devoted to the adaptive immune response. A microbe is one cell; the immune system is a civilization.
- This extends to cancer. The immune system typically out-adapts malignant cells despite selection acting far more rapidly on them. Immunosurveillance fails not because it is weak but because cancers occasionally evolve to exploit its specific tolerance mechanisms.
In short: the immune system embodies enough amortized optimization power to defend against online adversarial attacks by natural selection, because these attacks are constrained by the comparative simplicity of the attackers. One optimizer constrains another, faster and more adaptive optimizer, by having more resources.
What makes this especially interesting is that the immune system has no discernible volition. It is complex — probably far more so than I appreciate — but intuitively much more like a thermostat than a scheming eldritch god. It optimizes powerfully, within bounds that feel legible and non-agential.
I will not be so crass as to say "big if true for alignment", but you are permitted to infer this if it please you. I just think it's neat. Consider the mere phrase "semiotic immune system" (from, if I recall correctly, Charles Stross's Accelerando) — suggests a lot at once, eh?
I asked Claude to prepare the following tutorial - which I have not yet read (longa est vita, si uti bene scias...) - developing this theme: https://claude.ai/share/67bb8de3-b73c-4a21-916b-70affba0da43
*Written with slight corrections for conciseness from Opus4.6. Ironically, the em-dashes are mine.
2re point 2 - you say "A microbe is one cell", but the immune system has to battle against a constant onslaught or widely different invaders. I'm not sure the asymmetry is accurate. Researchers found that frail people over 60 had a low Colony Forming Unit per Gram (CFU/g) score of under 10⁴ CFU/g. At the very least people will eat one of two types of food-microial content: lactic acid bacteria, yeast molds, but there are others. This says nothing about viruses or non-dietary contact. Sauerkraut alone contains: Leuconostoc mesenteroides, Lactobacillus plantarum, Pediococcus pentosaceus, Lactobacillus brevis, Leuconostoc citreum, Leuconostoc argentinum, Lactobacillus paraplantarum, Lactobacillus coryniformis, and Weissella spp. Kimchi contains the bacteria Leuconostoc spp., Weissella spp., and Lactobacillus spp according to Wikipedia.
Yup I definitely agree there's no special role for unicellular attackers - I was eliding the complexity for brevity. I think the asymmetry still broadly holds meaningfully - e.g. multicellular parasites are very complex attackers but have much longer generation-times (I assume?), so they too trade off online vs offline optimization bits. Nonetheless the host organism still has more complexity to draw on for most things with which the immune system is concerned.
Interesting to think about the pareto frontier of offline vs online optimization. The multicellular parasites and unicellular microbes would be paradigm examples. But the microbiome gives lie to this idea - it is complex and organized but highly adaptive still because selection can act on the lower level. Perhaps being ~commensal/mutual instead of adversarial is related? I don't know.
Note: Skimming, Claude hallucinates what Alon's 'periodic table of diseases' is. He has a pretty good youtube video on it you can watch instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMz_C778WMY&pp=ygUeYWxvbiBwZXJpb2RpYyB0YWJsZSBvZiBkaXNlYXNl
The linked Claude conversation doesn't share the markdown file unfortunately. Apologies. Here is a gdrive link https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wpPGI7poP04ZMDoPU_lEh8D1CI8kOtic/view?usp=sharing I read it and it was a good introduction but it did a mediocre job of reframing things 'as an optimizer' or even 'as a control system'.