If there were no downsides to resolving a persistent issue, then why has it lasted so long??
If I understand correctly, your claim is that when we see long-standing issues like depression, chronic neck pain, or patterns of emotional avoidance persisting for years, it's more likely than not to be some sort of adaptive coping strategy—essentially a way the mind or body protects itself from harm–otherwise the issue would have been resolved.
Why do you think this is more likely than a mundane explanations such as "bad luck in the genetic lottery, no obvious levers to pull"?
a field where replications fail so badly that they result in firings and polemics in the New York Times and destroyed careers-
A field can be absolutely packed with dreadful research and still see virtually no one getting fired. Take, for instance, the moment a prominent psychologist dubbed peers who questioned methodological standards as “methodological terrorists.” It’s the kind of rhetoric that sends a clear message: questioning sloppy methods isn’t just unwelcome; it’s practically heretical.
People did in fact try to sound the alarm about poor statistical practices well before the replication crisis, and yet practices did not change,
This rings painfully true. As early as the late 1950s, at least one person was already raising a red flag about the risks that psychology[1] might veer into publishing a sea of false claims:
...There is some evidence that in fields where statistical tests of significance are commonly used, research which yields nonsignificant results is not published. Such research being unknown to other investigators m
I understand the claim you were making now and I hope the nitpicking isn't irritable.
This post seems to be arguing that veganism involves trade offs (I didn't read through the comments). I don't disagree with that claim[1] (and am grateful for you taking the time to write it up). The part I take issue with is that the two surveys you conducted were strong evidence, which I don't think they are.
Though I do lean towards thinking most people or even everyone should bite the bullet and accept the reduced health to spare the animals.
I agree with the claim you're making: that if FHI still existed and they applied for a grant from OP it would be rejected. This seems true to me.
I don't mean to nitpick, but it still feels misleading to claim "FHI could not get OP funding" when they did in fact get lots of funding from OP. It implies that FHI operated without any help from OP, which isn't true.
FHI could not get OP funding
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
OP appears to have been one of FHI's biggest funders according to Sandberg:[1]
...Eventually, Open Philanthropy became FHI’s most important funder, making two major grants: £1.6m in 2017, and £13.3m in 2018. Indeed, the donation behind this second grant was at the time the largest in the Faculty of Philosophy’s history (although, owing to limited faculty administrative capacity for hiring and the subsequent hiring freezes it imposed, a large part of this grant would remain unspent). W
Nice! I really like that you did that work and am in agreement that too many vegans in general (not just EA vegans) suck at managing their diet. Of the four former vegans who I know/known personally, all of them stopped because of health reasons (though not necessarily health reasons induced by being vegan).
That said, I don't see round 1 or round 2 as being particularly strong evidence of anything. The sample sizes seem too small to draw much inference from. There's +7k people in the EA movement,[1] with around 46% of whom are vegan or vegetaria...
Elizabeth: So I got them nutritional testing. It showed roughly what I thought. And this was like a whole thing. I applied for a grant. I had to test a lot of people. It's a logistical nightmare. I found exactly what I thought I would. that there were serious nutritional issues, not in everyone, but enough that people should have been concerned.
How many people in total were tested? From the Interim report, it looks like only six people got tested, so I assume you're referencing something else.
small wins in the present make it easier to get bigger wins in the future.
Mildly interesting: In his biography of Deng Xiaoping, Vogel implies he believed the same:
...For his civilian breakthrough in consolidation, Deng chose to focus on a project that would quickly both increase production and inspire others. Ever since his guerrilla days, he had believed in fighting small battles that he was sure to win, as a way of encouraging his troops as they prepared for larger battles. In 1975, many of the factories criticized for failing to meet production targets co
I don't know.
If the aldehyde preservation method is as good as traditional cryopreservation, then this looks like a pretty glaring market inefficiency—someone should be able to swoop in and undercut the established cryo companies.
I just don't know enough about the object level arguments to say much with confidence, but I'm a bit skeptical such a gap in the market exists.
Asch’s conformity experiment showed that the presence of a single dissenter tremendously reduced the incidence of “conforming” wrong answers. Individualism is easy, experiment shows, when you have company in your defiance. Every other subject in the room, except one, says that black is white. You become the second person to say that black is black. And it feels glorious: the two of you, lonely and defiant rebels, against the world!
It’s probably worth noting that most people are actually pretty okay with being lone dissenters—at least if we’re going b...
I'm in favour of saying true things. I feel the (current) title is slightly misleading.
What Oregon Brain Preservation is doing isn’t exactly cryonics in the traditional sense. Most of what they offer is aldehyde-based brain preservation, which stores your brain at refrigerator temperatures. They do have a cryonics option, but it's not free—$15,000 for whole-head cryopreservation, or if you’re feeling more minimalist, $5,000 for just the brain.
not including the cost of stand-by, which is also a significant portion (ie. staying at your bedside in advance until you die)
I assumed this was an overstatement. A quick check shows I'm wrong: TomorrowBio offer whole body (€200k) or just brain preservation (€60k). The 'standby, stabilisation and transport' service (included in the previous costs) amount to €80k and €50k respectively. I expected it to be much less.
That said, they still set aside €10K for long term storage of the head. I guess this means your head has a higher chance of being stored safety.
We're increasing the prices to €75k for brain-only. 15k for long-term storage, 60k for SST, without good SST it's not "cryopreservation", its freezing people.
And "Cryonics is free" is really a bad title. Not just because it's not true, but the organizations that offer it pro bono (paid by 3rd parties) should only be used by people who can't otherwise afford it. Else, they will cease to exist soon due to limited funding.
(disclaimer: I run tomorrow.bio)
Btw, Im happy to answer any question re cryopreservation if anybody is interested, just reach out.
The piece is unfair towards Bay Area Rationalists, but the critiques of Lumina can stand separate from what the author thinks about LW readers. "Haters gonna occasionally make some valid points" and such. Sometimes people who unfairly dislike you can also make valid critiques.
I think it's a fair point to note that:
I think this is fair. That said, a version of the post evaluating the dangers is arguably what Lumina should (and hopefully have) done. If they have, then publishing it should dispel most of what Klee critiques.
Probably not super helpful/what you're looking for, but one broad category of groups who go from 'doing violence' to 'doing much less or no violence' (often within a short space of time) are resistance organisations that successfully manage the transition, usually after achieving some level of progress. The ANC in South Africa seems like a good example. Sinn Féin in Ireland (established as the political wing of the IRA) is another.
This might not need pointing out, but could still be worth saying: whatever your motivations, without providing much concrete evidence for a moderately strong claim (increase IQ by almost 1 SD in 2 weeks), it's hard to believe you.
I somewhat agree with this, though it's separate from the point I was making.
It seems to me (and I could be misinterpreting you) that in your post, you're suggesting the greater the distance between the cave and the initial site of infection, the less likely natural origin theory is true. I wanted to point out that this is inaccurate.
It doesn't directly strengthen the lab leak theory: P(emergence at Wuhan & caves distant | leak) is pretty similar to P(emergence at Wuhan & caves nearby | leak).
It does greatly weaken the natural origin theory: P(emergence at Wuhan & caves distant | natural) << P(emergence at Wuhan & caves nearby | natural).
If those are the only credible alternatives, then it greatly increases the posterior odds of the lab leak hypothesis.
right, an intermediate host or some other mechanism could have moved the virus a long way before it went exponential.
Exactly. I'm confused why this might make you skeptical when it's generally accepted as having happened with SARS CoV-1. Could you explain?
If the virus moves around randomly, it should appear somewhere at random in a large radius of the animal reservoir, and it's unlikely to make it to specifically the lab where it was being studied!
Sure, but this is a separate point. That it turned up in Wuhan beside the WIV is surprising.
That it turned up hundreds of kilometers away from the precipitating reservoir isn't.
Small nitpick:
Then in late 2019, a novel coronavirus that spreads rapidly through humans, that has a Furin Cleavage Site, appears in... Wuhan... thousands of miles away from the bat caves in Southern China where the closest natural variants live, and only a few miles from Wuhan Institute of Virology
I don't think it's thousands of miles away. The caves where RaTG13 (one of Covids closest relatives and the same virus that was sampled by the Wuhan institute of virology) was first discovered are in Mojiang Hani Autonomous County, Yunnan, about 930 miles away (...
The site freerangekids has a map depicting an (anecdotal) decrease in childhood roaming over four generations. Not exactly hard data, but gestures at something obviously true.
Slightly adjacent to your post, but felt worth mentioning
I'm disappointed you didn't engage with Seth's claim that you're assuming all the claims made are either collectively true or collectively false.
Is it true that someone with psychosis (assuming your judgement is correct) making an allegation of sexual abuse is more likely to be lying/mistaken than not?
I.e someone with psychosis making a claim like the above is less likely than someone without psychosis to be accurately interpreting reality, but is their claim more likely to be false than not? Your argument leans heavily on her having psychosis. Do pe...
Post Meetup Notes:
The temporary disappearance of Jack Ma in 2020 when the CCP decided that his company Alibaba had become too powerful is another cautionary tale for Chinese tech CEOs to not challenge the CCP.
I think Jack Ma's disappearance had as much to do with Alibaba being powerful as it did with a speech he gave critiquing the CCP's regulatory policy.
There are other equally sized / influential companies in China (or even bigger ones such as Tencent) who's founders didn't disappear; the main difference being their deference to Beijing.
I think this explains his absence from this + the FLI letter.
He still seems to be doing public outreach though: see interview NY Times, interview with RTE, Big Think video and interview with Analytics India Magazine.
None of these interviews have discussed the email.
...We know, from like a bunch of internal documents, that the New York Times has been operating for the last two or three years on a, like, grand [narrative structure], where there's a number of head editors who are like, "Over this quarter, over this current period, we want to write lots of articles, that, like, make this point. That have this vibe. That arrive at roughly this conclusion." And then lots of editors are being given the task of, like, finding lots of articles to write that support this conclusion. And clearly that conclusion, [in some sense is
Is there a consensus on the idea of "training an ai to help with alignment"? What are the reasons that this would / wouldn't be productive?
John Wentworth categorizes this as Bad Idea, but elsewhere (I cannot remember where, it may have been in irl conversations) I've heard it discussed as being potentially useful.
I'm curious as to why you think this since I mostly believe the opposite.
Do you mean general "induce an organism to gain a function" research (of which I agree shouldn't be opposed) or specifically (probably what most people refer to / here) "cause a virus to become more pathogenic or lethal"?
Edit;
Your comment originally said you thought GoF research should go ahead. You've edited your comment to make a different point (viral GoF to transhumanist cognition enhancement).
Thus, once again, it seemed like the smart money would be on the system failing. Either the system is powerful enough to contain Covid or it is not. Exponential growth means that if containment is lost, China will have to deal with the same types of Covid problems as everyone else. That will be painful for a bit, face will be lost, and then life will return to normal. In the long run, it is inevitable.
Given the CCPs backtracking from its zero covid policy (at least for the moment), this looks like it was a pretty good prediction.
Hey Chris!
I have a few thoughts on this, though I have strong anti-advertising sentiments and might be overly sensitive to these things, so take it with a grain of salt.
The title sounds a little click baity. It's directed at the reader. The title "Do patients need years of therapy, or can one conversation resolve their issue?" is functionally identical, but feels less like an advert.
The opening reads somewhat like a common advert tactic: "I hated how business did [thing x] since it was bad for the customer, so I started my practice by doing [thing y]... (read more)