wilkox

The reason medical progress is so slow is largely the types of people who, when they hear a woman cured her own cancer and published the results to benefit others, heroically advancing the cause of humanity at risk to only herself, warn of the dire ethical problems with that.

Often those people call themselves ‘ethicists.’ No, seriously, that is a thing, and that situation somehow rose to the level of a writeup in Nature, which calls self-experimentation an ‘ethically fraught practice.’

I'm as contemptuous as anyone of most 'bioethics', but this does g... (read more)

Katelyn Jetelina has been providing some useful information on this. Her conclusion at this point seems to be 'more data needed'.

The epistemology was not bad behind the scenes, it was just not presented to the readers. That is unfortunate but it is hard to write a NYT article (there are limits on how many receipts you can put in an article and some of the sources may have been off the record).

I'd have more trust in the writing of a journalist who presents what they believe to be the actual facts in support of a claim, than one who publishes vague insinuations because writing articles is hard.

Cade correctly informed the readers that Scott is aligned with Murray on race and IQ.

It seems like you think what Metz wrote was acceptable because it all adds up to presenting the truth in the end, even if the way it was presented was 'unconvincing' and the evidence 'embarassing[ly]' weak. I don't buy the principle that 'bad epistemology is fine if the outcome is true knowledge', and I also don't buy that this happened in this particular case, nor that this is what Metz intended.

If Metz's goal was to inform his readers about Scott's position, he failed. He didn't give any facts other than that Scott 'aligned himself with' and quoted someb... (read more)

The section on ‘How do you do it?’ looks like a generalised version of John Platt's Strong Inference, a method of doing science that he believed ‘makes for rapid and powerful progress’. The essence of Strong Inference is to think carefully about a scientific question (the goal) to identify the main competing hypotheses that have yet to be discriminated between (the blockers), and devise and perform experiment(s) that rapidly discriminate between them (taking responsibility to remove the blockers and actually perform the next step).

Strong inference consis

And, part of the point here is "it is very hard to talk about this kind of thing". And I think that if the response to this post is a bunch of "gotcha! You said this comment was bad in one particular way, but it's actually bad in an interestingly different way", that kinda feels like it proves Elizabeth right?

This seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I wrote a post that said:

It's common for people on LessWrong to accuse others of misquoting them. For example, just the other day, Elizabeth said:

wilkox is always misquoting me! He claimed that I said the

For several of the examples you give, including my own comments, your description of what was said seems to misrepresent the source text.

Active suppression of inconvenient questions: Martín Soto

The charitable explanation here is that my post focuses on naive veganism, and Soto thinks that's a made-up problem.

This is not a charitable or even plausible description of what Martín wrote, and Martín has described this as a 'hyperbolic' misrepresentation of their position. There is nowhere in the source comment thread that Martín claims or implies anything resem... (read more)

This sounds like you're saying "I won't prescribe B12 until my patient gives up oreos" or even "I won't prescribe B12 until everyone gives up oreos", which would be an awful way to treat people.^[1]

[...]

You probably mean "I don't think Elizabeth/anyone should spend time on veganism's problems, when metabolic issues are doing so much more aggregate harm."

I wouldn’t say either of these things. A quick and easy treatment like B12 replacement is not mutually exclusive with a long-term and difficult treatment like diet modification. (This is not an abstrac... (read more)

I absolutely agree. McDonalds and the other demons of the Western Diet cause much more harm, both in absolute terms and per capita. That was really my point; within the class of 'health misinformation and disinformation that causes harm', furphies about vegan nutrition are a comparatively minor problem.

You don't just have a level of access, you have a type of access. Your access to your own mind isn't like looking at a brain scan.

From my Camp 1 perspective, this just seems like a restatement of what I wrote. My direct access to my own mind isn't like my indirect access to other people's minds; to understand another person's mind, I can at best gather scraps of sensory data like ‘what that person is saying’ and try to piece them together into a model. My direct access to my own mind isn't like looking at a brain scan of my own mind; to understand a brain ... (read more)

Apologies for the repetition, but I'm going to start by restating a slightly updated model of what I think is going on, because it provides the context for the rest of my comment. Basically I still think there are two elements to our disagreement:

1. The Camp 1 vs Camp 2 disagreement. Camp 1 thinks that a description of the physical system would completely and satisfactorily explain the nature of consciousness and subjective experience; Camp 2 thinks that there is a conceptual element of subjective experience that we don't currently know how to explain in phys

I would not count "psychotic" here, since one is not necessarily directly acquainted with it (one doesn't necessarily know one has it).

Would it be fair to say then that by ‘mental states’ you mean ‘everything that the brain does that the brain can itself be aware of’?

I thought you saw the fact that beliefs are about something as evidence that they are easier to explain than experiences

I don't think there is any connection between whether a thought/belief/experience is about something and whether it is explainable. I'm not sure about ‘easier to explain’, bu... (read more)

Mental states do not need to be "about" something, but it is pretty clear they can be.

I'm still a bit confused by what you mean by ‘mental states’. My best guess is that you are using it as a catch-all term for everything that is or might be going on in the brain, which includes experiences, beliefs, thoughts, and more general states like ‘psychotic’ or ‘relaxed’.

I agree that mental states do not need to be about something, but I think beliefs do need to be about something and thoughts can be about something (propositional in the way you describe). I don't... (read more)

Huh, this is interesting. I wouldn't have suspected this to be the crux. I'm not sure how well this maps to the Camp 1 vs 2 difference as opposed to idiosyncratic differences in our own views.

In your view however, if I'm not misunderstanding you, beliefs are more similar to utterances than to experiences. So while I think beliefs are equally hard to explain as experiences, in your view beliefs are about as easy to explain as utterances. Is this a fair characterization?

This is a fair characterisation, though I don't think ease of explanation is a crucial po... (read more)

Okay, so you are saying that in the first-person case, the evidence for having a headache is not itself the experience of having a headache, but the belief that you have the experience of having a headache.

Not quite. I would say that in the first-person case, the explanandum – the thing that needs to be explained – is the belief (or thought, or utterance) that you have the experience of having a headache. Once you have explained how some particular set of inputs to the brain led to that particular output, you have explained everything that is going on, in ... (read more)

You’re absolutely right that this is the more interesting case. I intentionally chose the past tense to make it easier to focus on the details of the example rather than the Camp #1/Camp #2 distinction per se. For completeness, I'll try to recapitulate my understanding of Rafael's account for the present-tense case ‘I have a headache right now’.

From my Camp #1 perspective, any mechanistic description of the brain that explained why it generated the thought/belief/utterance ‘I have a headache right now’ instead of ‘I don’t have a headache right now’ in resp... (read more)

This is a clear and convincing account of the intuitions that lead to people either accepting or denying the existence of the Hard Problem. I’m squarely in Camp #1, and while I think the broad strokes are correct there are two places where I think this account gets Camp #1 a little wrong on the details.

According to Camp #1, the correct explanandum is still "I claim to have experienced X" (where X is the apparent experience). After all, if we can explain exactly why you, as a physical system, uttered the words "I experienced X", then there's nothing else to

Surely you don't think that's the right moral category for ethical veganism?

I don't really understand what you're asking here. How would you describe the moral category you're referring to, and why do you think it doesn't or shouldn't apply to veganism?

Thoughts on why the post gave (me) the impression it did, in no particular order:

• 'Trade-offs' is broad and vague, and the post didn't make a lot of detailed claims about vegan nutrition. This makes sense in the context of you trying to communicate the detailed facts previously, but coming to the post without that context made it hard to tell if you were just making an unobjectionable claim or trying to imply something broader.
• Some statements struck me as technically true but hyperbolic. Examples:

You can get a bit of all known nutrients from plants and fort

That is a frustrating situation. As you note in the introduction this is a charged topic that tends to lead to poor discussions, so you deserve credit for wading in anyway.

Given the context I laid out, is there anything I could have done to create a more productive discussion with you, personally?

I'm not sure. The discussion in this comment thread (and others) has been productive in the sense that I now have a much better understanding of your position and the context. In terms of the original post, I don't know if a one-sentence summary would have changed... (read more)