There's existing work on frame control, it's not a term that Aella came up with herself. Without having traced the history too much I think it's an NLP term that then got picked up by pick up artists.
Evaluating information as evidence is a skill. It's a skill that's learned with practice. Being good at most skills isn't about simply following a set of explicit rules but learning how to execute the skill with real world practice.
One good practice for that is making forcasts about how likely certain future events happen to be.
It seems to me that the key difference between Said and Aella is that Aella basically says: "If you go into a group and interact in an emotional vulnerable way, you should expect receprocity in emotional vulnerability." On the other hand Said says "Don't go into groups and be emotionally vulnerable".
Aella is pro-Circling, Said is anti-Circling.
The only other is one semi recent thread where the author inferred the coordinated malicious intent of MIRI and the existence of self-described demons from extremely shaky grounds of reasoning none of which involve any “weird, abusive, and cultish behavior among some community leader rationalists”.
Given that there's no public explanation of why the word demon is used and potential infohazards involved in talking about that, there's little way from the outside to judge the grounds based on which the word is used.
There was research into paranormal phen... (read more)
I continue to be disappointed by people's compliance with authority during this pandemic. The perceived dangers of noncompliance seem almost entirely imaginary to me.
In Germany you have our government stopping vaccination they believe to be illegal (https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/schleswig-holstein/Nicht-zugelassener-Impfstoff-Behoerden-stoppen-Impfaktion-in-Luebeck,impfaktion178.html) even when it's not that clear that any law got violated.
Americans need to be prepared to do “anything and everything” to fight the omicron Covid variant, U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday.
Did anyone at the FDA get that memo?
Whether or not something provides valuable information is orthogonal from it being dangerous. The two aren't alternatives. Something can be valuable&dangerous.
I think the centralization of LessWrong was one of many mistakes the rationalist community made.
The rationalist community is not very certralized. People like Scott Alexander switched from writing their main posts on LessWrong and made their own blogs. Most of what EY writes these days is not on LessWrong either.
A lot of the conversations are happening on Facebook, Twitter, Slack and Discord channels.
To me the most remarkable thing about the Nature paper is that the word biosafety or BSL doesn't appear in it.
Saying they obviated the need of safety concerns and then doing the experiments without any biosafety protocols seems crazy.
Why wasn't this something that the official experts were talking about long ago?
We weren't the official experts talking about airborne transmission long ago?
Alternatively, gain of function research is useful and gives us advanced warning of natural mutations.
Even if it would produce useful information, that might still be the case that Omicron exists for those reasons. It's strange to use the word alternatively hear when any information gained doesn't negate the cost of potentially producing variants like Omicron.
To the extend that you believe that there's useful information, can you give any example of anything useful coming out of it?
But we inherently need international agreements to deal with these problems. I believe the US banning gain of function research in 2015 was one of the driving factors that pushed the research overseas into Wuhan.
That seems doubtful to me. It seems to me like as part of wanting world class scientists this is something the Chinese wanted regardless of US research policy as long as the research is held at high esteem by the international scientific community.
I expect that a majority of rationalists don't believe that being a porn star is morally-grey. In any case, if someone makes those accusations they should be very specific about what wrong doing the alledge and not just appeal to "repeatedly exploiting morally-grey".
The topics covered overlap with the present-day rationalist movement (centered on Lesswrong). They include religion and atheism, philosophy (especially philosophy of science and ethics), evolution, and psychology.
Religion and atheism isn't a central topic of LessWrong. To the extend that religion is a topic, it's more "what can we learn from religion" then about opposing it. At least I don't remember any highly received new atheist writing in the last years on LessWrong.
As far as evolution goes https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/evolution shows few recent writing about it.
At the beginning, LessWrong was strongly atheistic:
Later, writing about religion felt like beating a dead horse.
Then, I suppose as a part of the "meta-rationali... (read more)
And to be clear, a lot of this is true. Frame control breaks your reality down to fit another one, and while I view this as poisonous, the act of breaking down your frame can have huge benefits - similarly to how forcing a child to sit through school might break their creativity but give them the ability to reliably perform boring tasks.
I don't think similar is the right word here. In the normal school setting a good teacher has frame control within his classroom.
A key difference between your dad as you describe it is that the standard school t... (read more)
I'm not writing a question because I have my mind made up about whether it's a good idea, but because I think it's an important question about whether or not it's a good idea.
I think that too many COVID-19 related discussing are among people who have made their mind up/don't care about learning something new/thinking through the unknowns.
Announcing it might have meant that people who wait to get vaccinated till the new version arrives get better protection which is a message that the people at the CDC hate to tell people.
That might be enough to push the institutions into a state where they won't develop a slightly better vaccine that doesn't add much when it might make people more skeptical of taking the current one?
I have a lot of uncertainty here so, let me write a shortform for now. I'm not sure to what extend the following thoughts are true and I'm happy about comments
It seems that the body has two immune defense levels. One is in the mucosal immune system and there's a second that leads to antibodies in the blood.
SARS-CoV-2 infections usually first are in the upper respiratory tract where the mucosal system provides defense and not in where the immune system that provides antibodies that are active in the blood can fight the infection. https://www.frontiersin.org... (read more)
Developing a new version of the vaccine would probably face significant regulatory hurdle, and thus take time.
According to Pfizer, it should take 100 days. If they would have started that when it become clear that Delta will be soon the prevailing variant, we would have had access to the updated vaccine for a few months.
There's an expectation for new variants to become dominant every few months.
The best prediction seems to be those new variants will be varients of what's currently the most common variant and thus a vaccine that's updated against delta will... (read more)
A human made post-singularity AI would surpass the intellectual capabilities of ETs maybe 30 seconds after it did ours.
No, ETs likely have lived millions of years with post-singularity AI and to the extend they aren't themselves AI upgraded their cognitive capacity significantly.
Eric Weinstein & Michael Shermer: An honest dialogue about UFOs seems to me to cover the UFO topic well. The videos publically available aren't great evidence for UFO's but all the information we have about how part of the US military claims to see UFO's is very hard to bring together in a coherent scenario that makes sense.
Yesterday, I talked with a friend who together with her boyfriend got COVID. He was vaccinated, she wasn't. She had to go to the hospital while he didn't. However both have now the same long-COVID symptoms.
It's an anecdote and I'd really love if someone would actually study the question of how effective our vaccines are for preventing long-COVID...
As part of being inside Google DeepMind I would expect that this gives DeepMind already good access to security expertise. If you think that an external service like Latacora can do things that internal Google services can't, can you expand the argument of why you think so?
It seems like MIRI already had a very strong security policy that strongly inhibited their ability to do their job. By hiring professionals like Latacora, they might not only make MIRI more secure but might also provide helpful advice about what practices are creating an unnecessary burden.
If they are so confident that their vaccines are stellar successes, why did they specify in their contracts with European governments that they could not be held liable for side effects?
Courts of law can make companies liable for "side effects" whether or not there's scientific evidence that the "side effects" are caused by the drugs.
If you for example look at LYMErix it's not clear that the side effects were really that severe but they were still enough to get the vaccine withdrawn.
The two swiss labs Novartis and Roche, who respectively commercialize Lucentis and Avastin in Europe (undistinguishable treatments both created by Genetech, an American lab bought back by Roche - also, Novartis owns 33.33% of Roche), tried a legal action against France. I assume it was to outlaw the use of Avastin in the eyes.
That seems unlikely to me. Our health system doesn't work in a way that there's a normal process for outlawing drugs for being used for certain purposes.
Let's start with, Lucentis and Avastin are similar but the are not un... (read more)
Novartis was so miffed that they successfully lobbied for forbidding using Avastin in AMD cases
Can you be more specific to what you are referring to? What specific regulatory are you calling "forbidding using Avastin in AMD cases". What forbids off-label use here?
Stories about banned Google accounts look like:
Here is an example of how this can go awry. A slew of YouTube users had their Google accounts (not just their YouTube accounts) banned for “spamming” a video feed with Emojis. However, the YouTuber who created the video in question encouraged users to do just that, so Google didn’t have to go so far as to perform full account bans. To make matters worse, it took Google days before it reactivated everyone’s accounts. Even then, some experienced data loss.
Official Google Docs abuse policy does seem to indicate t... (read more)
Eliezer wrote:
Nothing else Elon Musk has done can possibly make up for how hard the "OpenAI" launch trashed humanity's chances of survival
To me it seems reasonable to see that as EY presuming judgement about the effects of OpenAI.
That sounds like you are in denail. I didn't make a statement about whether or not OpenAI raises AI risk but referred to the discussion about whether or not it has. That discussion exist and people like Eliezer argue that OpenAI results in a net risk increase. Being in denail about that discourse is bad. It can help with feeling good when working in the area but it prevents good analysis about the dynamics.
What happens when one's Google account gets banned because someone algorithm feels like there's a content violation?
The prospect of getting locked out of mobile phone service and my email at the same time seems frightening.
Given the discussion around OpenAI plausible increasing overall AI risk, why should we believe that the work will reduce in a net risk reduction?
For most of it's history Space X wasn't filling patents. They only did really start with that in 2019 (https://insights.greyb.com/spacex-patents/). I expect that a key motivation of why they started with that is to be able to use them defensively against Blue Origin.
The FDA not liking people using the horse version to treat illnesses that people have has nothing to do with ivermectin being ineffective for the illnesses in question.
We know that because in 2019 that already was the FDA position to be concerned about it's usage for Rosacea. The FDA just opposes US citizens to use cheaper versions to treat their diseases then the human versions that they approve.
... (read more)Ivermectin, and really any drug not deliberately designed either to bolster the human immune system or to fight viruses (and more specifically COVID-19), is
The Pfizer vaccine is not developed by Pfizer just like AstraZeneca's is not developed (as in decided on the formulation) by AstraZeneca. Both are big pharma companies.
(both Moderna and BioNTech are what's traditionally called biotech companies and not Big Pharma)
There's no assertion that this grant directly paid for the experiments from which COVID-19 escaped. The Baric&Shi paper from 2015 which came out of that grant reports work happening under biosafety level III.
Biosafety level II doesn't provide effective protection for the researchers when they deal with an airborne virus. Despite the denailist at the WHO SARS-COV-2, seems to spread via airborne infections, so it makes sense that the leak was from one of the experiments under biosafety level II which were not EcoHealth funded.
I'm still uncertain myself. My key crux at the moment is how side effects of the 2nd dose compare to side-effects of the 3rd dose.
I remember some posts that suggest the amount of people who sought medical help after the 3rd dose was concerningly higher.
While researching I found https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7039e4.htm?s_cid=mm7039e4_w as a source and going from 0/0->2.1/1.4 (Moderna/Pfizer) indeed sounds concerning. However it seems like the 0's were only based on a total of 64/66 patients so a good part of that difference might be random noi... (read more)
If you for example want the critcism on GiveWell, Ben Hoffman was employed at GiveWell and made experiences that suggest that the process based on which their reports are made has epistemic problems. If you want the details talk to him.
The general model would be that between actual intervention and the top there are a bunch of maze levels. GiveWell then hired normal corporatist people who behave in the dynamics that the immoral maze sequence describes play themselves out.
Vassar's action themselves are about doing altruistic actions more directly by l... (read more)
What he said is compatible with Ex-CEA people still being bound by the NDA's they signed they were at CEA. I don't think anything happened that releases ex-CEA people from NDAs.
The important thing is that CEA is responsible for those NDA and is free to unilaterally lift them if they would have an interest in the free flow of information. In the case of a settlement with contracts between the two organisations CEA couldn't unilaterally lift the settlement contract.
Public pressure on CEA seems to be necessary to get the information out in the open.
There's no reason to create inaccurate headlines on LessWrong. The article doesn't claim that EcoHealth created SARS-CoV-2.
Shi's lab did gain-of-function research under biosafety level 2 as they describe in their own papers like Evolutionary Arms Race between Virus and Host Drives Genetic Diversity in Bat Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Related Coronavirus Spike Genes. The acknowledgement section of that paper describes that funding as:
"This work was jointly funded by the strategic priority research program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (grant XDB29... (read more)
The physical laws allow us to get an idea about how hard nuclear fussion happens to be. It allows us to rule a lot of approaches as not having the chance to work.
I talked with Geoff and according to him there's no legal contract between CEA and Leverage that prevents information sharing. All information sharing is prevented by organization internal NDA's.
Huh, that's surprising, if by that he means "no contracts between anyone currently at Leverage and anyone at CEA". I currently still think it's the case, though I also don't see any reason for Geoff to lie here. Maybe there is some technical sense in which there is no contract between Leverage and CEA, but there are contracts between current Leverage employees, who used to work at CEA, and current CEA employees?
Social norms and what's publically endorsed are not the same thing. It's still debatable whether those norms exist but this is a bad argument.
Was that a member of the local community in your country? How much EA contact and how much rationality contact did they have?
My experience of the rationality community is one where we value Daniel's poems and Raemon's songs. The vibe of the LessWrong community weekend is not one of cultural values that tell people to avoid art.
To the extend that this share is true, for what subset of the rationality community suffers from it?
... (read more)(By the way, Eliezer Yudkowsky, this is what post-Rationalists are, it’s not that complicated—they don’t have explicit principles because they’ve moved on from thinking that life is entirely about explicit principles. Perhaps you don’t intuitively gras
I'm no lawyer but I do think that article 27 of the universal human rights convention is important here:
Article 27 Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
Crucially while $27 protects the material interests of the author it doesn't protect those of the publisher.
I think there are plenty of Indians whose human rights are violated by effectively forbidding them from sharing in scientific advancement by reading scientific papers.
It seems like you didn't provide an address where people who want to support the project can donate towards. Why does that happen to be the case? Are there legal reasons that make that make that difficult?
Thiel does speak about all asset classes not really providing the returns that the LP's desire.
The interview with Thiel and Eric Schmitt is good in this regard. Google holding 50 billion on it's balance sheet because they don't see any way to invest that in a profitable way is a good illustration of those dynamics.
Yes, but part of risk is that it comes with people losing their fortune. Elon Musk is richer then any Rotschield.
While it's not about Scott's writing style in particular but about another LessWrong user https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ndHmbz9tyEgc88oiP/how-to-write-like-kaj-sotala is an indepth investigation into how Kaj Sotala writes his articles which are generally well received.