DirectedEvolution

Pandemic Prediction Checklist: H5N1

Pandemic Prediction Checklist: Monkeypox

Correlation does imply some sort of causal link.

For guessing its direction, simple models help you think.

Controlled experiments, if they are well beyond the brink

Of .05 significance will make your unknowns shrink.

Replications prove there's something new under the sun.

Did one cause the other? Did the other cause the one?

Are they both controlled by something already begun?

Or was it their coincidence that caused it to be done?

Wiki Contributions

Comments

How in-depth have you looked at the studies about declining performance in doctors with age? An obvious alternative hypothesis is that doctors gain skill as they age, and therefore tend to take on higher-risk patients and procedures with worse outcomes. I am not saying that's what's going on here - I'd just like to know if this is something you've looked into.

The big difference between AI and these technologies is that we're worried about adversarial behavior by the AI. 

A more direct analogy would be if Wright & co had been worried that airplanes might "decide" to fly safely until humanity had invented jet engines, then "decide" to crash them all at once. Nuclear bombs do have a direct analogy - a Dr. Strangelove-type scenario in which, after developing an armamentarium in a ostensibly carefully-controlled manner, some madman (or a defect in an automated launch system) triggers an all-out nuclear attack and ends the world.

This is the difficulty, I think. Tech developers naturally want to think in terms of a non-adversarial relationship with their technology. Maybe this is more familiar to biologists like myself than to people working in computer science. We're often working with living things that can multiply, mutate and spread, and which we know don't have our best interests in mind. If we achieve AGI, it will be a living in silico organism, and we don't have a good ability to predict what it's capable of because it will be unprecedented on the earth.

No, but it and its competitors do somehow exist... Why isn't there something similar for paywalled websites?

Good thoughts in general, I'm about where you are - VR is overall headed in a direction where I'm really excited to use it.

Disagree on the device looking cool. It looks like a snorkeling mask, which is still better than the blindfolded look of the Meta Quest.

What it might achieve is being acceptable in public. Google Glass failed because people perceived wearers as potential perverts, photographing people surreptitiously. If Apple can make people perceive the AVP as people who are "having more fun than you are on the plane" - i.e. get people intrigued about other people's use of the technology rather than intimidated by it - that will be a win for the company (and its customers).

I am sort of surprised that there's no equivalent of "spotify for websites." It's easy for me to imagine a service offering an ad-supported and paid subscription that streams otherwise-paywalled websites to you, distributing the revenue as a fraction of clicks or something like that, and only displaying ads on the websites to the ad-supported tier of users. Is there some enormous technological or security hurdle that makes this much harder to do for streaming websites than for streaming music?

I’d also add that female labor force participation rates will move these numbers around some. Their calculations assume all countries have 50% female participation when calculating income, when it actually varies from 11%-85% or so.

Just wanted to chime in and say that for weeks before reading your post, I'd also been interpreting Tyler's behavior on AI in exactly the same way you describe here. Thanks for expressing it so well.

(3) isn't about AI so I don't think Zvi's model explains that. If we ignore (1) and (2), then the one example we're left with (which may or may not be badly reasoned) isn't good enough evidence to say that somebody "just consistently makes badly-reasoned statements."

The whole point of capitalism is that the people who have and direct money are the ones who can make good decisions about how it should be used. When you see firsthand that high-level decision-making is a farce, where does that leave you?

I actually don't see capitalism as being fueled primarily by good decision-making in the C suite. Instead, I think that there's significant uncertainty around decisions at all levels of the company, and many limitations to their courses of action. Many, many businesses fail because of this.

But an existing company has been selected for having lurched its way to having robust demand, to an extent that all that uncertainty and confusion can be tolerated. There's an incredibly powerful market signal saying MAKE THIS PRODUCT, and the company can survive and even thrive as long as it does a passable job.

But for the same reason, I don't think that most good-paying jobs are attached to the person of wealthy individuals, and I don't think there's a finite number of them either. Jobs pop up in businesses that are set to fail as well as longstanding successful businesses. CEOs can't just pack up a company and move it at the drop of a hat, much as they'd like it if they could. There's lots of money out there looking for founders to invest in, and those founders need teams, and when those teams are successful, new companies grow, creating new jobs. And the winners get bought out, and big companies spin off little companies, and on and on. I think this is a pretty typical, mainstream view of economics.

It's really hard for me to imagine what experiences could have lead you to think there's just this static, finite number of jobs that rich people can take when they decide to move to a different town because too many poor people moved in. Even if most CEOs are very dumb (and I still don't think that's likely to be true), the zero-sum model doesn't follow, and again - I don't really understand the details of your zero-sum model well enough to fully understand what it is you're proposing.

This is why I think it would be really helpful for you to make an effort to plug into a larger conversation. I appreciate and sort of believe that you've had experiences that would be convincing evidence of some of your claims, if only you could share them openly. But given that you can't, you could at least look for what evidence is out in public - beyond just one letter by Bill Gates - and try to make a real case for some of the components of your worldview. If you are correct, then we all could learn from you, but it is very hard to open myself to updating my worldview very much based on the arguments and evidence you have gathered here.

Relatedly, Bill Gates’ article wasn’t that bad.  Sure, there’s some inaccuracies if you’re reading it strictly.  But it’s not meant to be read strictly.  It’s basically marketing material aimed at a very large crowd, which, as discussed above, requires using phrasing that gets the point across, not phrasing that is scientifically accurate when dissected.

 

There are inaccuracies in the article, period. It would be embarassing for an engineer to make the mistake of conflating Celsius and Kelvin when comparing boiling point ratios, as in the claim that sodium's boiling point is 8x higher than that of water. Bill Gates' audience is going to have a number of technically savvy people in it, he knows it, and this alone is a college freshman/high school-level mistake. There are others.

My update on reading the article is, in fact, to downgrade my perception of Bill Gates' technical expertise beyond the world of computer software and hardware, and to trust his ability to communicate science less.

That said, nobody needs to be an expert in every subject, and it might be that Gates' wealth and diverse interests and fame simply put him in a position to try and interpret areas of science he's not able to understand adequately. He's unusual for a billionaire founder/CEO figure, and I personally wouldn't update too much on his mistake here as evidence about the ability of other CEOs to understand their company's specific technology to a level of depth adequate to run the business well. But I would put some probability mass into "CEOs are, in general, shockingly bad at understanding the technologies and products their company sells and they also don't have the ability to tell who in their company does understand what their company is selling."

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