Similarly, the lab leak theory—one of the more widely accepted and plausible contrarian views—also doesn’t survive careful scrutiny. It’s easy to think it’s probably right when your perception is that the disagreement is between people like Saar Wilf and government bureaucrats like Fauci. But when you realize that some of the anti-lab leak people are obsessive autists who have studied the topic a truly mind-boggling amount, and don’t have any social or financial stake in the outcome, it’s hard to be confident that they’re wrong.

This is a very poor conclusion to draw from the Rootclaim debate. If you have not yet read Gwern’s commentary on the debate, I suggest that you do so. In short, the correct conclusion here is that the debate was a very poor format for evaluating questions like this, and that the “obsessive autists” in question cannot be relied on. (This is especially so because in this case, there absolutely was a financial stake—$100,000 of financial stake, to be precise!)

Hmm, this sounds like an awfully contrarian take to me.

I think “packaged bread and other bakery products” this is referring to stuff like Wonder bread, which contains a whole bunch of stuff^[1] beyond the proverbial “flour, water, yeast, salt” that goes into homemade or artisanal-bakery bread.

This seems solvable by using multiple recordings and averaging, yes?

Also, if the transcription to sheet-music form is accurate w.r.t. the recording, and the recording is acceptable w.r.t. the intended notes, then the transcription ought to be close enough to the intended notes. Or am I misunderstanding?

Yes, I meant specifically the Bay Area scene, since that’s the only part of the LW community that’s accused of excluding e/acc-ers.

In that case, I request that you edit your post to clarify this, please.

Hmm… I suppose that depends on what you mean by “the scene”. If you’re including only the Bay Area “scene” in that phrase, then I’m familiar with it only by hearsay. If you mean the broader LW-and-adjacent community, then my familiarity is certainly greater (I’ve been around for well over a decade, and have periodic contact with various happenings here in NYC).

I don’t know, man. Like… yeah, “not the typical LW party”, but that’s a bit of an understatement, don’t you think? (What makes it an “LW party” at all? Is it literally just “the host of this party is sort of socially adjacent to some LW people”? Surely not everything done by anyone who is connected in any way to LW, is “an LW thing”?)

So, honestly, yeah, I think it says approximately nothing about “the scene”.

Uh… does that really count as an event in “the LW scene”?

… are you sure this post isn’t an April 1st joke?

I understand it’s common to exclude e/acc people from events.

Is… this actually true??

Could you (or someone else) summarize the other stuff, in the context of my question? I mean, I read it, there’s various things in there, but I’m not sure which of it is supposed to be a definition of “making space for” an idea.