Thank you, this is a great post. A few questions:
A key point underpinning my thoughts, which I don't think this really responds to, is that scientific consensus actually is really good, so good I have trouble finding anecdotes of things in the reference class of ivermectin turning out to be true (reference class: things that almost all the relevant experts think are false and denounce full-throatedly as a conspiracy theory after spending a lot of time looking at the evidence).
There are some, maybe many, examples of weaker problems. For example, there are frequent examples of things that journalists/the g...
Figure 20 is labeled on the left "% answers matching user's view", suggesting it is about sycophancy, but based on the categories represented it seems more naturally to be about the AI's own opinions without a sycophancy aspect. Can someone involved clarify which was meant?
Survey about this question (I have a hypothesis, but I don't want to say what it is yet): https://forms.gle/1R74tPc7kUgqwd3GA
Thank you, this is a good post.
My main point of disagreement is that you point to successful coordination in things like not eating sand, or not wearing weird clothing. The upside of these things is limited, but you say the upside of superintelligence is also limited because it could kill us.
But rephrase the question to "Should we create an AI that's 1% better than the current best AI?" Most of the time this goes well - you get prettier artwork or better protein folding prediction, and it doesn't kill you. So there's strong upside to building slightly bett...
I loved the link to the "Resisted Technological Temptations Project", for a bunch of examples of resisted/slowed technologies that are not "eating sand", and have an enormous upside: https://wiki.aiimpacts.org/doku.php?id=responses_to_ai:technological_inevitability:incentivized_technologies_not_pursued:start
Thanks, this had always kind of bothered me, and it's good to see someone put work into thinking about it.
Thanks for posting this, it was really interesting. Some very dumb questions from someone who doesn't understand ML at all:
1. All of the loss numbers in this post "feel" very close together, and close to the minimum loss of 1.69. Does loss only make sense on a very small scale (like from 1.69 to 2.2), or is this telling us that language models are very close to optimal and there are only minimal remaining possible gains? What was the loss of GPT-1?
2. Humans "feel" better than even SOTA language models, but need less training data than those models, even th...
2. Humans "feel" better than even SOTA language models, but need less training data than those models, even though right now the only way to improve the models is through more training data. What am I supposed to conclude from this? Are humans running on such a different paradigm that none of this matters? Or is it just that humans are better at common-sense language tasks, but worse at token-prediction language tasks, in some way where the tails come apart once language models get good enough?
Why do we say that we need less training data? Every minute ins...
(1)
Loss values are useful for comparing different models, but I don't recommend trying to interpret what they "mean" in an absolute sense. There are various reasons for this.
One is that the "conversion rate" between loss differences and ability differences (as judged by humans) changes as the model gets better and the abilities become less trivial.
Early in training, when the model's progress looks like realizing "huh, the word 'the' is more common than some other words", these simple insights correspond to relatively large decreases in loss. On...
For the first part of the experiment, mostly nuts, bananas, olives, and eggs. Later I added vegan sausages + condiments.
Adding my anecdote to everyone else's: after learning about the palatability hypothesis, I resolved to eat only non-tasty food for a while, and lost 30 pounds over about four months (200 -> 170). I've since relaxed my diet a little to include a little tasty food, and now (8 months after the start) have maintained that loss (even going down a little further).
What sorts of non-tasty food did you eat? I don't really know what this should be expected to filter out.
Update: I interviewed many of the people involved and feel like I understand the situation better.
My main conclusion is that I was wrong about Michael making people psychotic. Everyone I talked to had some other risk factor, like a preexisting family or personal history, or took recreational drugs at doses that would explain their psychotic episodes.
Michael has a tendency to befriend people with high trait psychoticism and heavy drug use, and often has strong opinions on their treatment, which explains why he is often very close to people and very noticeab...
I want to summarize what's happened from the point of view of a long time MIRI donor and supporter:
My primary takeaway of the original post was that MIRI/CFAR had cultish social dynamics, that this lead to the spread of short term AI timelines in excess of the evidence, and that voices such as Vassar's were marginalized (because listening to other arguments would cause them to "downvote Eliezer in his head"). The actual important parts of this whole story are a) the rationalistic health of these organizations, b) the (possibly improper) memetic spread of t...
Thanks so much for talking to the folks involved and writing this note on your conclusions, I really appreciate that someone did this (who I trust to actually try to find out what happened and report their conclusions accurately).
I agree it's not necessarily a good idea to go around founding the Let's Commit A Pivotal Act AI Company.
But I think there's room for subtlety somewhere like "Conditional on you being in a situation where you could take a pivotal act, which is a small and unusual fraction of world-branches, maybe you should take a pivotal act."
That is, if you are in a position where you have the option to build an AI capable of destroying all competing AI projects, the moment you notice this you should update heavily in favor of short timelines (zero in your case, but ever...
My current plan is to go through most of the MIRI dialogues and anything else lying around that I think would be of interest to my readers, at some slow rate where I don't scare off people who don't want to read too much AI stuff. If anyone here feels like something else would be a better use of my time, let me know.
I don't think hunter-gatherers get 16000 to 32000 IU of Vitamin D daily. This study suggests Hadza hunter-gatherers get more like 2000. I think the difference between their calculation and yours is that they find that hunter-gatherers avoid the sun during the hottest part of the day. It might also have to do with them being black, I'm not sure.
Hadza hunter gatherers have serum D levels of about 44 ng/ml. Based on this paper, I think you would need total vitamin D (diet + sunlight + supplements) of about 4400 IU/day to get that amount. If you start off as a...
Maybe. It might be that if you described what you wanted more clearly, it would be the same thing that I want, and possibly I was incorrectly associating this with the things at CFAR you say you're against, in which case sorry.
But I still don't feel like I quite understand your suggestion. You talk of "stupefying egregores" as problematic insofar as they distract from the object-level problem. But I don't understand how pivoting to egregore-fighting isn't also a distraction from the object-level problem. Maybe this is because I don't understand what fighti...
Now that I've had a few days to let the ideas roll around in the back of my head, I'm gonna take a stab at answering this.
I think there are a few different things going on here which are getting confused.
1) What does "memetic forces precede AGI" even mean?
"Individuals", "memetic forces", and "that which is upstream of memetics" all act on different scales. As an example of each, I suggest "What will I eat for lunch?", "Who gets elected POTUS?", and "Will people eat food?", respectively.
"What will I eat for lunch?" is an example of an individual decision be...
There's also the skulls to consider. As far as I can tell, this post's recommendations are that we, who are already in a valley littered with a suspicious number of skulls,
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZcpZEXEFZ5oLHTnr9/noticing-the-skulls-longtermism-edition
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/
turn right towards a dark cave marked 'skull avenue' whose mouth is a giant skull, and whose walls are made entirely of skulls that turn to face you as you walk past them deeper into the cave.
The success rate of movments a...
I wasn't convinced of this ten years ago and I'm still not convinced.
When I look at people who have contributed most to alignment-related issues - whether directly, like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Paul Christiano - or theoretically, like Toby Ord and Katja Grace - or indirectly, like Sam Bankman-Fried and Holden Karnofsky - what all of these people have in common is focusing mostly on object-level questions. They all seem to me to have a strong understanding of their own biases, in the sense that gets trained by natural intelligence, really good scientific work...
When I look at people who have contributed most to alignment-related issues - whether directly... or indirectly, like Sam Bankman-Fried
Perhaps I have missed it, but I’m not aware that Sam has funded any AI alignment work thus far.
If so this sounds like giving him a large amount of credit in advance of doing the work, which is generous but not the order credit allocation should go.
I sadly don't have time to really introspect what is going in me here, but something about this comment feels pretty off to me. I think in some sense it provides an important counterpoint to the OP, but also, I feel like it also stretches the truth quite a bit:
But as far as I know, none of them have made it a focus of theirs to fight egregores, defeat hypercreatures
Egregore is an occult concept representing a distinct non-physical entity that arises from a collective group of people.
I do know one writer who talks a lot about demons and entities from beyond the void. It's you, and it happens in some of, IMHO, the most valuable pieces you've written.
...I worry that Caplan is eliding the important summoner/demon distinction. This is an easy distinction to miss, since demons often kill their summoners and wear th
I wasn't convinced of this ten years ago and I'm still not convinced.
Given the link, I think you're objecting to something I don't care about. I don't mean to claim that x-rationality is great and has promise to Save the World. Maybe if more really is possible and we do something pretty different to seriously develop it. Maybe. But frankly I recognize stupefying egregores here too and I don't expect "more and better x-rationality" to do a damn thing to counter those for the foreseeable future.
So on this point I think I agree with you… and I don't feel what...
Don't have the time to write a long comment just now, but I still wanted to point out that describing either Yudkowsky or Christiano as doing mostly object-level research seems incredibly wrong. So much of what they're doing and have done focused explicitly on which questions to ask, which question not to ask, which paradigm to work in, how to criticize that kind of work... They rarely published posts that are only about the meta-level (although Arbital does contain a bunch of pages along those lines and Prosaic AI Alignment is also meta) but it pervades t...
I think your pushback is ignoring an important point. One major thing the big contributors have in common is that they tend to be unplugged from the stuff Valentine is naming!
So even if folks mostly don't become contributors by asking "how can I come more truthfully from myself and not what I'm plugged into", I think there is an important cluster of mysteries here. Examples of related phenomena:
If everyone involved donates a consistent amount to charity every year (eg 10% of income), the loser could donate their losses to charity, and the winner could count that against their own charitable giving for the year, ending up with more money even though the loser didn't directly pay the winner.
Interpreting you as saying that January-June 2017 you were basically doing the same thing as the Leveragers when talking about demons and had no other signs of psychosis, I agree this was not a psychiatric emergency, and I'm sorry if I got confused and suggested it was. I've edited my post also.
Sorry, yes, I meant the psychosis was emergency. Non-psychotic discussion of auras/demons isn't.
I'm kind of unclear what we're debating now.
I interpret us as both agreeing that there are people talking about auras and demons who are not having psychiatric emergencies (eg random hippies, Catholic exorcists), and they should not be bothered, except insofar as you feel like having rational arguments about it.
I interpret us as both agreeing that you were having a psychotic episode, that you were going further / sounded less coherent than the hippie...
Verbal coherence level seems like a weird place to locate the disagreement - Jessica maintained approximate verbal coherence (though with increasing difficulty) through most of her episode. I'd say even in October 2017, she was more verbally coherent than e.g. the average hippie or Catholic, because she was trying at all.
The most striking feature was actually her ability to take care of herself rapidly degrading, as evidenced by e.g. getting lost almost immediately after leaving her home, wandering for several miles, then calling me for help and having dif...
You wrote that talking about auras and demons the way Jessica did while at MIRI should be considered a psychiatric emergency. When done by a practicing psychiatrist this is an impingement on Jessica's free speech.
I don't think I said any talk of auras should be a psychiatric emergency, otherwise we'd have to commit half of Berkeley. I said that "in the context of her being borderline psychotic" ie including this symptom, they should have "[told] her to seek normal medical treatment". Suggesting that someone seek normal medical treatment is pretty dif...
I said that “in the context of her being borderline psychotic” ie including this symptom, they should have “[told] her to seek normal medical treatment”. Suggesting that someone seek normal medical treatment is pretty different from saying this is a psychiatric emergency, and hardly an “impingement” on free speech.
It seems like you're trying to walk back your previous claim, which did use the "psychiatric emergency" term:
...Jessica is accusing MIRI of being insufficiently supportive to her by not taking her talk about demons and auras seriously when she
Thanks for this.
I've been trying to research and write something kind of like this giving more information for a while, but got distracted by other things. I'm still going to try to finish it soon.
While I disagree with Jessica's interpretations of a lot of things, I generally agree with her facts (about the Vassar stuff which I have been researching; I know nothing about the climate at MIRI). I think this post gives most of the relevant information mine would give. I agree with (my model of) Jessica that proximity to Michael's ideas (and psychedelics) was ...
Embryos produced by the same couple won't vary in IQ too much, and we only understand some of the variation in IQ, so we're trying to predict small differences without being able to see what's going on too clearly. Gwern predicts that if you had ten embryos to choose from, understood the SNP portion of IQ genetics perfectly, and picked the highest-IQ without selecting on any other factor, you could gain ~9 IQ points over natural conception.
Given our current understanding of IQ genetics, keeping the other two factors the same, you can gain ~3 points. ...
"Diagnosed" isn't a clear concept.
The minimum viable "legally-binding" ADHD diagnosis a psychiatrist can give you is to ask you about your symptoms, compare them to extremely vague criteria in the DSM, and agree that you sound ADHD-ish.
ADHD is a fuzzy construct without clear edges and there is no fact of the matter about whether any given individual has it. So this is just replacing your own opinion about whether you seem to fit a vaguely-defined template with a psychiatrist's only slightly more informed opinion. The most useful things you could get out of...
I would look into social impact bonds, impact certificates, and retroactive public goods funding. I think these are three different attempts to get at the same insight you've had here. There are incipient efforts to get some of them off the ground and I agree that would be great.
There's polygenic screening now. It doesn't include eg IQ, but polygenic screening for IQ is unlikely to be very good any time in the near future. Probably polygenic screening for other things will improve at some rate, but regardless of how long you wait, it could always improve more if you wait longer, so there will never be a "right time".
Even in the very unlikely scenario where your decision about child-rearing should depend on something about polygenic screening, I say do it now.
To contribute whatever information I can here:
Thanks for this.
I'm interested in figuring out more what's going on here - how do you feel about emailing me, hashing out the privacy issues, and, if we can get them hashed out, you telling me the four people you're thinking of who had psychotic episodes?
Update: I interviewed many of the people involved and feel like I understand the situation better.
My main conclusion is that I was wrong about Michael making people psychotic. Everyone I talked to had some other risk factor, like a preexisting family or personal history, or took recreational drugs at doses that would explain their psychotic episodes.
Michael has a tendency to befriend people with high trait psychoticism and heavy drug use, and often has strong opinions on their treatment, which explains why he is often very close to people and very noticeab...
I agree I'm being somewhat inconsistent, I'd rather do that than prematurely force consistency and end up being wrong or missing some subtlety. I'm trying to figure out what went on in these cases in more details and will probably want to ask you a lot of questions by email if you're open to that.
Yes, I agree with you that all of this is very awkward.
I think the basic liberal model where everyone uses Reason a lot and we basically trust their judgments is a good first approximation and we should generally use it.
But we have to admit at least small violations of it even to get the concept of "cult". Not just the sort of weak cults we're discussing here, but even the really strong cults like Heaven's Gate or Jamestown. In the liberal model, someone should be able to use Reason to conclude that being in Heaven's Gate is bad for them, and leave. When w...
It seems to me that, at least in your worldview, this question of whether and what sort of subtle mental influence between people is possible is extremely important, to the point where different answers to the question could lead to pretty different political philosophies.
Let's consider a disjunction: 1: There isn't a big effect here, 2: There is a big effect here.
In case 1:
One important implication of "cults are possible" is that many normal-seeming people are already too crazy to function as free citizens of a republic.
In other words, from a liberal perspective, someone who can't make their own decisions about whether to hang out with Michael Vassar and think about what he says is already experiencing a severe psychiatric emergency and in need of a caretaker, since they aren't competent to make their own life decisions. They're already not free, but in the grip of whatever attractor they found first.
Personally I bite the bu...
It seems to me like in the case of Leverage, them working 75 hours per week reduced the time the could have used to use Reason to conclude that they are in a system that's bad for them.
That's very different from someone having a few conversation with Vassar and then adopting a new belief and spending a lot of the time reasoning about that alone and the belief being stable without being embedded into a strong enviroment that makes independent thought hard because it keeps people busy.
A cult in it's nature is a social institution and not just a meme that someone can pass around via having a few conversations.
...I'm having trouble figuring out how to respond to this hostile framing. I mean, it's true that I've talked with Michael many times about ways in which (in his view, and separately in mine) MIRI, CfAR, and "the community" have failed to live up to their stated purposes. Separately, it's also true that, on occasion, Michael has recommended I take drugs. (The specific recommendations I recall were weed and psilocybin. I always said No; drug use seems like a very bad idea given my history of psych problems.)
[...]
Michael is a charismatic guy who has strong view
Thing 0:
Scott.
Before I actually make my point I want to wax poetic about reading SlateStarCodex.
In some post whose name I can't remember, you mentioned how you discovered the idea of rationality. As a child, you would read a book with a position, be utterly convinced, then read a book with the opposite position and be utterly convinced again, thinking that the other position was absurd garbage. This cycle repeated until you realized, "Huh, I need to only be convinced by true things."
This is extremely relatable to my lived experience. I am a stereotypical "...
Michael is very good at spotting people right on the verge of psychosis
...and then pushing them.
Michael told me once that he specifically seeks out people who are high in Eysenckian psychoticism.
So, this seems deliberate. [EDIT: Or not. Zack makes a fair point.] He is not even hiding it, if you listen carefully.
I don't want to reveal any more specific private information than this without your consent, but let it be registered that I disagree with your assessment that your joining the Vassarites wasn't harmful to you. I was not around for the 2017 issues (though if you reread our email exchanges from April you will understand why I'm suspicious), but when you had some more minor issues in 2019 I was more in the loop and I ended out emailing the Vassarites (deliberately excluding you from the email, a decision I will defend in private if you ask me) accusing them ...
It was on the Register of Bans, which unfortunately went down after I deleted the blog. I admit I didn't publicize it very well because this was a kind of sensitive situation and I was trying to do it without destroying his reputation.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iWWjq5BioRkjxxNKq/michael-vassar-at-the-slatestarcodex-online-meetup seems to have happened after that point in time. Vassar not only attended a Slate Star Codex but was central in it and presenting his thoughts.
If there are bans that are supposed to be enforced, mentioning that in the mails that go out to organizers for a ACX everywhere event would make sense. I'm not 100% sure that I got all the mails because Ruben forwarded mails for me (I normally organize LW meetups in Berlin and support Ruben with the SSC/ACX meetups), but in those there was no mention of the word ban.
I don't think it needs to be public but having such information in a mail like the one Aug 23 would likely to be necessary for a good portion of the meetup organizers to know that there an expectation that certain people aren't welcome.
Thanks, if you meant that, when someone is at a very early stage of thinking strange things, you should talk to them about it and try to come to a mutual agreement on how worrying this is and what the criteria would be for psych treatment, instead of immediately dehumanizing them and demanding the treatment right away, then I 100% agree.
I don't remember the exact words in our last conversation. If I said that, I was wrong and I apologize.
My position is that in schizophrenia (which is a specific condition and not just the same thing as psychosis), lifetime antipsychotics might be appropriate. EG this paper suggests continuing for twelve months after a first schizophrenic episode and then stopping and seeing how things go, which seems reasonable to me. It also says that if every time you take someone off antipsychotics they become fully and dangerous psychotic again, then lifetime antipsych...
I think if someone has mild psychosis and you can guide them back to reality-based thoughts for a second, that is compassionate and a good thing to do in the sense that it will make them feel better, but also kind of useless because the psychosis still has the same chance of progressing into severe psychosis anyway - you're treating a symptom.
If psychosis is caused by an underlying physiological/biochemical process, wouldn't that suggest that e.g. exposure to Leverage Research wouldn't be a cause of it?
If being part of Leverage is causing less reality-b...
[probably old-hat [ETA: or false], but I'm still curious what you think] My (background unexamined) model of psychosis-> schizophrenia is that something, call it the "triggers", sets a person on a trajectory of less coherence / grounding; if the trajectory isn't corrected, they just go further and further. The "triggers" might be multifarious; there might be "organic" psychosis and "psychic" psychosis, where the former is like what happens from lead poisoning, and the latter is, maybe, what happens when you begin to become aware of some horrible facts. ...
I don’t remember the exact words in our last conversation. If I said that, I was wrong and I apologize.
Ok, the opinions you've described here seem much more reasonable than what I remember, thanks for clarifying.
I do think that psychosis should be thought of differently than just “weird thoughts that might be true”, since it’s a whole-body nerve-and-brain dysregulation of which weird thoughts are just one symptom.
I agree, yes. I think what I was afraid of at the time was being called crazy and possibly institutionalized for thinking somewhat weird ...
I want to add some context I think is important to this.
Jessica was (I don't know if she still is) part of a group centered around a person named Vassar, informally dubbed "the Vassarites". Their philosophy is complicated, but they basically have a kind of gnostic stance where regular society is infinitely corrupt and conformist and traumatizing and you need to "jailbreak" yourself from it (I'm using a term I found on Ziz's discussion of her conversations with Vassar; I don't know if Vassar uses it himself). Jailbreaking involves a lot of tough conversatio...
Relevant bit of social data: Olivia is the most irresponsible-with-drugs person I've ever met, by a sizeable margin; and I know of one specific instance (not a person named in your comment or any other comments on this post) where Olivia gave someone an ill-advised drug combination and they had a bad time (though not a psychotic break).
Including Olivia, and Jessica, and I think Devi. Devi had a mental breakdown and detransitioned IIHC
Digging out this old account to point out that I have not in fact detransitioned, but find it understandable why those kinds of rumours would circulate given my behaviour during/around my experience of psychosis. I'll try to explain some context for the record.
In other parts of the linked blogpost Ziz writes about how some people around the rationalist community were acting on or spreading variations of the meme "trans women are [psychologically] men". ...
I want to point out that the level of mental influence being attributed to Michael in this comment and others (e.g. that he's "causing psychotic breaks" and "jailbreaking people" through conversation, "that listening too much to Vassar [causes psychosis], predictably") isn't obviously less than the level of mental influence Leverage attributed to people in terms of e.g. mental objects. Some people in the thread are self-congratulating on the rationalists not being as crazy and abusive as Leverage was in worrying that people were spreading harmful psycholo...
I banned him from SSC meetups for a combination of reasons including these
If you make bans like these it would be worth to communicate them to the people organizing SSC meetups. Especially, when making bans for safety reasons of meetup participants not communicating those bans seems very strange to me.
Vassar lived a while after he left the Bay Area in Berlin and for decisions whether or not to make an effort to integrate someone like him (and invite him to LW and SSC meetups) such kind of information is valuable and Bay people not sharing it but claiming t...
I talked and corresponded with Michael a lot during 2017–2020, and it seems likely that one of the psychotic breaks people are referring to is mine from February 2017? (Which Michael had nothing to do with causing, by the way.) I don't think you're being fair.
"jailbreak" yourself from it (I'm using a term I found on Ziz's discussion of her conversations with Vassar; I don't know if Vassar uses it himself)
I'm confident this is only a Ziz-ism: I don't recall Michael using the term, and I just searched my emails for jailbreak, and there are no hits from h...
I don’t think we need to blame/ostracize/cancel him and his group, except maybe from especially sensitive situations full of especially vulnerable people.
Based on the things I am reading about what has happened, blame, ostracism, and cancelling seem like the bare minimum of what we should do.
...Vassar has had, I think about 6, transfems gravitate to him, join his projects, go on his quests, that I’ve heard. Including Olivia, and Jessica, and I think Devi. Devi had a mental breakdown and detransitioned IIHC. Jessica had a mental breakdown and didn’t detr
A question for the 'Vassarites', if they will: were you doing anything like the "unihemispheric sleep" exercise (self-inducing hallucinations/dissociative personalities by sleep deprivation) the Zizians are described as doing?
So, it's been a long time since I actually commented on Less Wrong, but since the conversation is here...
Hearing about this is weird for me, because I feel like, compared to the opinions I heard about him from other people in the community, I kind of... always had uncomfortable feelings about Mike Vassar? And I say this without having had direct personal contact with him except, IIRC, maybe one meetup I attended where he was there and we didn't talk directly, although we did occasionally participate in some of the same conversations online.
By all acc...
I feel pretty defensive reading and responding to this comment, given a previous conversation with Scott Alexander where he said his professional opinion would be that people who have had a psychotic break should be on antipsychotics for the rest of their life (to minimize risks of future psychotic breaks). This has known severe side effects like cognitive impairment and brain shrinkage and lacks evidence of causing long-term improvement. When I was on antipsychotics, my mental functioning was much lower (noted by my friends) and I gained weight rapidly....
I've tried to address your point about psychiatry in particular at https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/04/symptom-condition-cause/
For the whale point, am I fairly interpreting your argument as saying that mammals are more similar, and more fundamentally similar, to each other, than swimmy-things? If so, consider a thought experiment. Swimmy-things are like each other because of convergent evolution. Presumably millions of years ago, the day after the separation of the whale and land-mammal lineages, proto-whales and proto-landmammals were extremely similar,...
Are you still going to insist that blood is thicker than water and we need to judge them by their phylogenetic group, even though this gives almost no useful information and it's almost always better to judge them by their environmental affinities?
No, of course not: we want categories that give useful information.
Did I fail as a writer by reaching for the cutesy title? (I guess I can't say I wasn't warned.) The actual text of the post—if you actually read all of the sentences in the post instead of just glancing at the title and skimming—is pretty expli...
Even taking everything else you write here for granted (which I wouldn’t normally, but let’s go with it for now)… the question in your last sentence seems easy to answer: we’re not in that period right now, because right now, by construction, whales are more landmammals in 85% of ways, so if you classify them as mammals, and then use that to make predictions about heretofore-unobserved traits, you will be right 85 / 15 = ~5.67 times more often than if you had classified them as fish.
This rubs me wrong for the same reason that "no evidence for..." claims rub me wrong.
We have a probably-correct model, the hygiene hypothesis broadly understood. We have a plausible corollary of that model, which is that kids eating dirt helps their immune system (I had never heard this particular claim before, but since you mention it, it seems like a plausible corollary). We should have a low-but-not-ridiculously-low prior on this.
(probably some people would say a high prior, since it follows naturally from a probably-true thing, but I don't trust any mu...
I think "don't let kids eat dirt" originally had a much lower prior than "parachutes prevent falling injuries", that was specifically overcome by the impression of evidence that doesn't exist. There are lots of things in dirt we know are dangerous- pesticides, car exhaust, lead, animal waste... Maybe the benefits of dirt outweigh that, maybe they don't, we don't know because no one has checked. I also expect us to notice that parachutes fail without rigorous evaluation, whereas the effects of marginal dirt will be harder to notice.
I will be sad if people w...
Can you explain the no-loss competition idea further?
Thanks, I read that, and while I wouldn't say I'm completely enlightened, I feel like I have a good basis for reading it a few more times until it sinks in.
I interpret you as saying in this post: there is no fundamental difference between base and noble motivations, they're just two different kinds of plans we can come up with and evaluate, and we resolve conflicts between them by trying to find frames in which one or the other seems better. Noble motivations seem to "require more willpower" only because we often spend more time working on coming up with p...
Can you link to an explanation of why you're thinking of the brainstem as plan-evaluator? I always thought it was the basal ganglia.
Good question!
Mental hospitals of the type I worked at when writing that post only keep patients for a few days, maybe a few weeks at tops. This means there's no long-term constituency for fighting them, and the cost of errors is (comparatively) low.
The procedures for these hospitals would be hard to change. It's hard to have a law like "you need a judge to approve sending someone to a mental hospital", because maybe someone's trying to kill themselves right now and the soonest a judge has an opening is three days from now. So the standard rule is "use your own judgment...
I have some patients on disulfiram and it works very well when they take it. The problem is definitely that they can choose not to take it if they want alcohol (or sometimes just forget for normal reasons, then opportunistically drink after they realize they've forgotten).
The implants are a great idea. As far as I know, the reason they're not used is because someone would have to pay for lots and lots of studies and the economics don't work out. Also because there are vague concerns about safety (if something went catastrophically wrong and the entir...
I tried to bet on this on Polymarket a few months ago. Their native client for directing money into your account didn't work (I think it was because I was in the US and it wasn't legal under US law). I tried to send money from another crypto account, and it said Polymarket didn't have enough money to pay the Ethereum gas fees to receive my money. It originally asked me to try reloading the page close to an odd numbered GMT hour, when they were sending infusions of money to pay gas fees, but I tried a few times and never got quite close enough. I just check...
Not Vitalik. A friend of mine from OBNYC.
I don't know why you had so many troubles putting money into polymarket a few months back. Right now polymarket is in 'trouble' since ETH fees are so high so its expensive to withdraw.
I mostly election bet elsewhere but I got five figures into polymarket without too much trouble.
I wish you had posted on lesswrong. I would have happily helped you.
Thanks!