All of frankybegs's Comments + Replies

Dumbass here with close to zero knowledge about finance stuff- why a call? A call is basically an option to buy at a certain price, right? So why would that be better than just buying the stock now at current price?

I'm not sure if that weak correlation would persist at the extremes, though; when there are basic failures of execution, such as having an apparently abandoned website, I think there is some reason for concern, if only because it might indicate a shortage of resources or inactivity. An organisation's longevity and funding security are obviously of the utmost importance here, and the website doesn't fill me with confidence in that regard.

Is this unfounded? I don't know much about the company and couldn't see anything about this on the site.

Is the argument for the s-risk concern just basically that the suffering in some scenarios could be so great that you have to get sort of Pascal mugged? Or is there reason to think there actually a significant probability of extreme suffering scenarios?

The weed thing is not true. It can sap your motivation acutely, and perhaps even have a more sustained (if definitely temporary) effect. But it certainly doesn't ruin your life by instantly "knocking your motivational system off balance".

in fact, never use an inhaled or injected recreational drug, period - the fast uptake is extremely dangerous and will likely actually knock your motivation system off balance hard enough to probably ruin your life.

I don't think this can be remotely justified by the evidence, formal or anecdotal. Inhaling weed isn't dangerous, let alone extremely so, and will almost certainly not ruin anyone's life, as the hundreds of millions of happy users can attest (get yours today!) Hell, shisha is an inhaled recreational drug!

I'm not sure it makes sense to generalise about an entire method of delivery, when all sorts of substances with very different effects can be consumed that way.

By what mechanism could natural selection have optimised our diets? Why should we expect long-tenured features of our diet to be necessarily healthy? We have consumed alcohol since long before we were modern humans, as one obvious counter-example to this sort of argument.

I think much of this is quite unreasonable (and some very unreasonable- you "don't like that I spoke as spoke as an authority on her life" because I wondered if what she observed was truly attributable to a causal effect?!), but I don't see the value in going over it, especially as others have made the points I would make about your tone and framing elsewhere. I continue to find your contributions on this topic a  little more combative and "soldier mindset" than is ideal, but clearly you strongly disagree. (Although it's tempting to suggest that your ... (read more)

I do not believe that Cade Metz used specialized hacking equipment to reveal Scott's last name

I said "specialist journalist/hacker skills".

I don't think it's at all true that anyone could find out Scott's true identity as easily as putting a key in a lock, and I think that analogy clearly misleads vs the hacker one, because the journalist did use his demonstrably non-ubiquitous skills to find out the truth and then broadcast it to everyone else. To me the phone hacking analogy is much closer, but if we must use a lock-based one, it's more like a lock... (read more)

I didn't, thanks! I'm a fairly long-time visitor but sporadic-at-best commenter here, primarily because I feel I can learn much more than I can contribute (present case included).

I'd love to know why you think it's weak. As I mentioned before, it doesn't seem any more than suggestive to me (and to be fair Chen acknowledges as much), but it does seem quite suggestive, and it has introduced a hint of doubt in me.

I get the sense that I've gotten your back up slightly here, which is perhaps not without justification as I admit to having been a touch suspicious... (read more)

it is hard to write a NYT article

Clearly. But if you can't do it without resorting to deliberately misleading rhetorical sleights to imply something you believe to be true, the correct response is not to.

Or, more realistically, if you can't substantiate a particular claim with any supporting facts, due to the limitations of the form, you shouldn't include it nor insinuate it indirectly, especially if it's hugely inflammatory. If you simply cannot fit in the "receipts" needed to substantiate a claim (which seems implausible anyway), as a journalist you should omit that claim. If there isn't space for the evidence, there isn't space for the accusation.

Scott thinks very highly of Murray and agrees with him on race/IQ. 

This is very much not what he's actually said on the topic, which I've quoted in another reply to you. Could you please support that claim with evidence from Scott's writings? And then could you consider that by doing so, you have already done more thorough journalism on this question than Cade Metz did before publishing an incredibly inflammatory claim on it in perhaps the world's most influential newspaper?

This is reaching Cade Metz levels of slippery justification.

He doesn't make the accusation super explicit, but (a) people here would be angrier if he did, not less angry

How is this relevant? As Elizabeth says, it would be more honest and epistemically helpful if he made an explicit accusation. People here might well be angry about that, but a) that's not relevant to what is right and b) that's because, as you admit, that accusation could not be substantiated. So how is it acceptable to indirectly insinuate that accusation instead? 

(Also c), I think yo... (read more)

So despite it being "hard to substantiate", or to "find Scott saying" it, you think it's so certainly true that a journalist is justified in essentially lying in order to convey it to his audience?

Your argument rests on a false dichotomy. There are definitely other options than 'wanting to know truth for no reason at all' and 'wanting to know truth to support racist policies'. It is at least plausibly the case that beneficial, non-discriminatory policies could result from knowledge currently considered taboo. It could at least be relevant to other things and therefore useful to know!

What plausible benefit is there to knowing Scott's real name? What could it be relevant to?

It's almost the only comment you haven't replied to, aside from the downvoted ones at the bottom. Third one down if your comments are sorted by top scoring, which I assume is default? It's by Alex K. Chen.

It honestly seems kind of hard to miss, and cites some interesting suggestive evidence that low iron levels could actually be healthy, which is why I asked.

Not hugely important, but I want to point out because I think the concept is in the process of having its usefulness significantly diluted by overuse: that's not a straw man. That's just a false reason.

A straw man is when you refute an argument that your opponent didn't make, in order to make it look like you've refuted their actual argument.

One specific thing that I'd definitely have challenged is the 'I don't think the New Yorker article was very fair to my point of view'. What point of view, specifically, and how was it unfair? Again, very much easier from the comfort of my office than in live conversation with him, but I would have loved to see you pin him down on this.

I agree on the latter example, which is a particularly unhelpful one to use unless strictly necessary, and not really analogous here anyway.

But on the lock example, what is the substantive difference? His justification seems to be 'it was easy to do, so there's nothing wrong with doing it'. In fact, the only difference I detect makes the doxxing look much worse. Because he's saying 'it was easy for me to do, so there's nothing wrong with me doing it on behalf of the world'.

So while it's also heat-adding, on reflection I can't think of any real world exampl... (read more)

This frankly enraged me. Good job on the directness of the opening question. I think you fell back a little quickly, and let him get away with quite a lot of hand-waving, where I would have tried to really nail him down on the details and challenge him to expand on those flimsy justifications. But that's very easy to say, and not so easy to do in the context of a live conversation.

Can I ask, a year later, why you didn't reply to the person who cited evidence that low iron is good?

Of the comments, that one seems by far the most productive for you to engage with, at least for me as an almost-zero-knowledge reader (and recently converted ethical vegan who is eager to mitigate any health tradeoff). But it's the only upvoted comment you haven't replied to! I'd be really interested in what you have to say about it.

If the the benefits persisted for two years after ceasing to take the iron, doesn't that suggest that iron wasn't actually the causal factor? Or am I missing something here?

How is death one of the least bad options? Can you expand on that?

Apologies, I just read your reply to Joseph C.

I would like to request the information, your reservations notwithstanding. I am happy to sign a liability waiver, or anything of that nature that would make you feel comfortable. I am also happy to share as much data as it is feasible to collect, and believe I could recruit at least some controls. As I mention above, I don't think I'll be able to implement the intervention in its entirety, given practical and resource constraints, but given your stated interest in a '1000 ships' approach this seems like it could be a positive for you.

Sorry if I've missed something about this elsewhere, but is it possible to explain what it involves to people who aren't going to properly do it?

I don't have 4+ hours a day to spare at the moment, nor $10k, but I'd love to know what the intervention involves so I can adopt as much of it as it is feasible to do (given it sounds like a multi-pronged intervention). Unless there's reason to think it only works as an all-or-nothing? Even just the supplements on their own sounds like they might be worth trying, otherwise.

Well it wouldn't be you then, would it?

I watch TV in a pretty focused way where I take things in.

But I wasn't suggesting you watch it like a TV show; just that's a similar time commitment (ie not an unreasonable one).

For the claim that people generally seem to have updated towards zoonotic origin as a result of the debate? No formal evidence, of course, but do you spend much time on LW/ACX/other rationalist internet spaces? It seems an unavoidable conclusion, if a difficult one to produce evidence of.

Only the other day there was a significant debate on /r/ssc about whether the emphatic win for the zoonotic side meant that we were logically compelled to update in that direction, due to conservation of evidence (I argued against that proposition, but I seemed to be in the minority).

Evaluating arguments is easier to do when they are done via text.

Isn't there a transcript? In any case, this seems to be highly subjective, and in my opinion not hugely relevant anyway. To extend the analogy, your expectation of someone's having read foundational texts before making strong claims would hardly be lessened by the objection that the texts were hard to read.

I don't think anyone has shown that the debate contains specific arguments that Roko is unfamiliar with. 

Do we need to positively show that? As I mentioned, many intelligent, thoughtfu... (read more)

My source for that was Wikipedia, which in turn cites this article in the South China Morning Post:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3047238/why-wild-animals-are-key-ingredient-chinas-coronavirus-outbreak

Having now actually read the article, I didn't see the claim that it was the largest, so that may actually be made up.

But the article does make it clear that there was much more than seafood, with all sorts of animals including foxes, wolf cubs, snakes, hedgehogs, rats, frogs and palm civets.

The problem with "lab-leak is unlikely, look at this 17-hour debate" is that it is too short an argument, not a too long one.

It isn't an argument, it's a citation. 

I don't think a 17 hour debate is "inaccessible" to someone who is invested in this issue and making extremely strong, potentially very seriously libellous claims without having investigated some of the central arguments on the question at hand.

A foundational text in some academic field might take 17 hours to read, but you would still expect someone to have read it before making a priori wi... (read more)

This is fair, but as I said elsewhere:

I think what is missing here is that this debate has been cited repeatedly in rationalist spaces, by people who were already quite engaged with the topic, familiar with the evidence, and in possession of carefully-formed views, as having been extremely valuable and informative, and having shifted their position significantly. I think it's reasonable to expect someone to consume that information before claiming near-certainty on the question.

The arguments there seem like they have to be worth at least familiarising your... (read more)

That seems to generalize to "no-one is allowed to make any claim whatsoever without consuming all of the information in the world".

I would say that it generalises to 'one shouldn't make a confident proclamation of near-certainty without consuming what seems to be very relevant information to the truth of the claim'. Which I would agree with.

I think what is missing here is that this debate has been cited repeatedly in rationalist spaces, by people who were already quite engaged with the topic, familiar with the evidence, and in possession of carefully-forme... (read more)

Isn't the fact that it's the largest wet market in central China relevant here? Surely that greatly increases the chance of it travelling to Wuhan specifically in a zoonotic origin scenario, because animals are brought there from all around.

Your post appears to, by repeatedly emphasising the distance in the context of arguing that a zoonotic origin is unlikely.

What makes you think they could get the death penalty? In what jurisdiction, and consequent to what conviction? It doesn't seem likely that they would be convicted of murder if they were doing what was at the time considered normal science, surely, and while I suppose they could get a manslaughter or equivalent conviction via negligence, that wouldn't ever carry a sentence so severe.

> Reasonable norms of good debate suggest relevant counterarguments should be proportional in length and readability to the original argument, which in this case is Rokos compact nine-minute post.

This seems entirely *un*reasonable to me. Some arguments simply can't be properly made that concisely, and this principle seems to bias us towards finding snappy, simplistic explanations rather than true ones.

Someone else mentioned 'The Pyramid and the Garden', but I'm reminded of the sort of related argument about Atlantis in https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11... (read more)

I don't think someone should need to pay you thousands of dollars to engage with full arguments for and against a proposition before you claim near-certainty about it. It's just sort of a pre-requisite for having that kind of confidence in your belief, or having it be taken seriously. Perhaps particularly when you're not only disagreeing with the expert consensus, but calling that expertise into question because they disagree with you.

Wonderful writing! It's rare to see something written so beautifully without sacrificing rigour; often aesthetic and rigorous writing seem like different ends of a spectrum.

I'm not so sure you managed to avoid "major spoilers" for Grizzly Man, but nice subtle reference to the AI in woman's clothing film; got the point across while preserving the surprise for anyone who hasn't seen it. A fantastic film, and probably a major reason I'm more intuitively receptive to the concept of AI risk than most.

Just to maximally clarify, I didn't mean to suggest that the offer was itself inherently combative.

I certainly don't "see what I'm doing", because I wasn't trying to do anything other than explain why your engagement with STMT seemed combative and unfairly accusatory. It did, and it does, reading it later. I hope/suspect that with the advantage of the same temporal remove, you will also see exactly why I and many others thought so.

I don't believe this is true, at all. I don't believe any part of this is true, actually.

I don't think there is a nutritionist consensus. And I don't think that there is wide agreement, even, about a plant based diet being superior. And I don't think there's any way of reliably demonstrating how dietary modifications impact health. If there were, we wouldn't still need to be doing all these terrible studies in a desperate attempt to know anything at all.

If you can provide support for any of these assertions I'd be interested.

I don't think you're being cynical enough. Nutritional science is a science, technically, I guess, but it's one of the worst in terms of the quality of evidence it's practical to produce.

And there certainy is not as much consensus as you suggest- I don't agree that there's any at all on saturated fats.

It's unclear to me what would make diet advice "rationalist".

This probably just means 'put together by members of this community'. Which is reasonable, because this community often does a better job of taking rational, evidence based approaches to things than the world at large.

I'm not sure what is achieved by the tone of this piece. It's bordering on uncivil.

Especially since, as others comments have pointed out, you make more of your objections than is really warranted. There are some excellent points in there, but also some points where you needlessly exaggerated the difference between your beliefs.

Aren't we supposed to be learning together? Why the adversarial approach?

Thank you! How do I browse content tags in general?

How do I find more 'fact posts'? That's probably my favourite type of content here, and I clicked on the hyperlink hoping that it was a content tag and I could spend a few hours gorging!

My immediate objection is that I don't seem to catch myself any less over time- I catch myself plenty, I just don't do anything about it.

Just wanted to say I signed up for a trial on the strength of this pitch, so well done! It sounds like something that could be really useful for me.