Nick Laing

Thanks for this response, I'm enjoying this debate.

You say "Despite this, he is more extreme in his confidence that things will be ok than the average expert"

From the perspective of an outsider like me, this statement doesn't seem right. In the only big survey I could find with thousands of AI experts in 2024, the median p doom (which equates with the average expert) was 5% - pretty close to BB's. In addition Expert forecasters (who are usually better than domain experts at predicting the future) put risk below 1 %. Sure many higher profile experts have more extreme positions , but these aren't the average and there are some like Yann... (read more)

this might just be my first LessWrong contribution - unless it is again (incorrectly) rejected for appearing LLM generated......

I just had a chilling moment just now. For the first time in my life I was mistaken for an AI! My first ever comment on Lesswrong was REJECTED for the reason of  "No LLM generated, heavily assisted/co-written, or otherwise reliant work". This felt a little unpleasant and Icky, but mostly just surprising. I don't consider myself a bad writer and would have thought that my writing was different enough from LLM content that this wouldn't happen. For the record I only use LLMs for research and have never used them for writing forum... (read 496 more words →)

This seems to be a nice observational study which analyses already available data, with an interesting and potentially important finding.

They didn't do "controlling" in the technical sense of the word, they matched cases and controls on 40 baseline variables in the cohort with "demographics, 15 comorbidities, concomitant cardiometabolic drugs, laboratories, vitals, and health-care utilization"

The big caveat here is that these impressive observational findings often disappear, or become much smaller when a randomised controlled trial is done. Observational studies can never prove causation. Usually that is because there is some silent feature about the kind of people that use melatonin to sleep, that couldn't be matched for or was missed in the matching.... (read more)