In the classic movie "Bridge on the River Kwai", a new senior Allied officer (Colonel Nicholson) arrives in a Japanese POW camp and tries to restore morale among his dispirited men. This includes ordering them to stop malingering/sabotage and to build a proper bridge for the Japanese, one that will stand as a tribute to the British Army's capabilities for centuries - despite the fact that this bridge will harm the British Army and their allies.
While I always saw the benefit to prisoner morale in working toward a clear goal, I took a long time to see the Co...
I consider "6. Aims to kill us all" to be an unnecessary assumption, one that overlooks many existential risks.
People were only somewhat smarter than North America's indigenous horses and other large animals, most of which were wiped out (with our help) long ago. However, eliminating horses and megafauna probably wasn't a conscious aim. Those were most likely inadvertent oopsies, similar to wiping out the passenger pigeon (complete with shooting and eating the last survivor found in the wild) and our other missteps. I can only barely imagine ASI objectives...
Early in the Ivermectin/COVID discussion, I posted on Twitter the best peer-reviewed study I could find supporting Ivermectin for COVID and the best study (peer-reviewed meta-analysis) I could find opposing Ivermectin for COVID. My comment was that it was important to read reputable sources on both sides and reach informed conclusions. That tweet linking to peer-reviewed research was labeled "misinformation", and my account got my first suspension.
A second tweet (yes, I'm a slow learner - I thought adding good data to that discussion was essential) contain...
Responding to your points on "Here are some of the things I agree that you do not need to do":
[Note: I was reluctant to post this because if AGI is a real threat, then downplaying that threat could destroy all value in the universe. However, I chose to support discussion of all sides on this issue.]
[WARNING - my point may be both inaccurate and harmful - WARNING!]
It's not obvious that AGI will be dangerous on its own, especially if it becomes all-powerful in comparison to us (also not obvious that it will remain safe). I do not have high confidence in either direction, but it seems to me that those designing the AGI can and will shape that outcome ...
I agree on not terribly detailed. It's more of an "I checked, and Climate Change is correct" than a critical analysis. [I'll reread it more carefully in a few weeks, but that was my impression on a first reading, admittedly while drugged up after surgery.]
Perhaps I'm looking for the impossible, but I'm not comfortable with the idea that climate is so esoteric that no one outside the field can understand anything between CO2 traps UV at one extreme ... and the other extreme consisting of the entire model with conclusion that therefore the planet will warm b...
This is an important point that is often ignored.
"Does blinding as it's commonly done mean that the patients don't know whether they are taking the placebo or not?" You likely get a lot of them falsely answering that it means that because they are ignorant of the literature that found that if you ask patients they frequently have some knowledge."
Accurate - and obvious on reflection, particularly with the COVID vaccines. I knew multiple people in the COVID vaccine trials. Just over half confidently said they got the real vaccine, and they knew it because of...
Very much not asking that anyone write a new post on Climate Change, since I assume a good discussion on that topic exists, but ... does anyone have a recommended link to a critical analysis of those questions comparable to Scott Alexander's discussion of Ivermectin, one that neither assumes a priori that the environmental science community will always get such questions right nor that those who question the approved science are idiots?
And, yes, I have read Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change (ipcc.ch), and several previous editions, but that...
Excellent point on the selective subject matter placement of articles with misleading implications. Thank you. I should have thought that through.
"How the media makes errors"?
I think Zvi's point is that errors do not dominate media deceptions. Their writing is a made up of conscious choices that mostly follow clear rules.
For those who don't know and didn't look these up:
NPI = Nonpharmaceutical Intervention Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions and COVID-19 Burden in the United States - PMC (nih.gov)
GDPR = General Data Protection Regulation What is GDPR, the EU’s new data protection law? - GDPR.eu
MAID = medical assistance in dying Medical assistance in dying - Canada.ca
If you model this as telling you that people who previously would have had no health insurance now have Medicaid, while telling you nothing about those people otherwise, this seems like good news.
Not conditioning on this tells you that an awful lot of Americans need Medicaid and cannot do better. Which seems, if new information, like very bad news.
There is a third option, one that fits in nicely with your view of bureaucracy.
The rules for Medicaid enrollment changed: The Families First Coronavirus Response Act COVID-19 Public Health Emergency Unwindi...
"But why would an AI experience entertainment?"
I think it's reasonable to assume that AI would build one logical conclusion on another with exceptional rapidity, relative to slower thinkers. Eventually, and probably soon because of its speed, I expect that AI would hit a dead end where it simply doesn't have the facts to add to its already complete analysis of the information it started with plus the information it has collected. In that situation, many people would want entertainment, so we can speculate that maybe AI would want entertainment too. Generalizing from one example is not anywhere near conclusive, but it provides a plausible scenario.