All of Stephen Bennett's Comments + Replies

IIRC, dentists have some of the highest rates of depression and suicide of any profession.

I'm pretty sure that this is incorrect compared to healthcare more broadly, although the best I can come up with is this meta-analysis: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0226361&type=printable

Which has this to say:

As there are few exploitable studies about dental surgeons, nurses and other health-care workers, we didn’t treat them in that meta-analysis

Congratulations! I wish we could have collaborated while I was in school, but I don't think we were researching at the same time. I haven't read your actual papers, so feel free to answer "you should check out the paper" to my comments.

For chapter 4: From the high level summary here it sounds like you're offloading the task of aggregation to the forecasters themselves. It's odd to me that you're describing this as arbitrage. Also, I have frequently seen the scoring rule be used with some intermediary function to determine monetary rewards. For example, whe... (read more)

What do you think Metz did that was unethical here?

Soft downvoted for encouraging self-talk that I think will be harmful for most of the people here. Some people might be able to jest at themselves well, but I suspect most will have their self image slightly negatively affected by thinking of themselves as an idiot.

Most of the individual things you recommend considering are indeed worth considering.

Interesting work, congrats on achieving human-ish performance!

I expect your model would look relatively better under other proper scoring rules. For example, logarithmic scoring would punish the human crowd for giving >1% probabilities to events that even sometimes happen. Under the Brier score, the worst possible score is either a 1 or a 2 depending on how it's formulated (from skimming your paper, it looks like 1 to me). Under a logarithmic score, such forecasts would be severely punished. I don't think this is something you should lead with, since ... (read more)

The second thing that I find surprising is that a lie detector based on ambiguous elicitation questions works. Again, this is not something I would have predicted before doing the experiments, but it doesn’t seem outrageous, either.

I think we can broadly put our ambiguous questions into 4 categories (although it would be easy to find more questions from more categories):

Somewhat interestingly, humans who answer nonsensical questions (rather than skipping them) generally do worse at tasks: pdf. There's some other citations in there of nonsensical... (read more)

See this comment.

You edited your parent comment significantly in such a way that my response no longer makes sense. In particular, you had said that Elizabeth summarizing this comment thread as someone else being misleading was itself misleading.

In my opinion, editing your own content in this way without indicating that this is what you have done is dishonest and a breach of internet etiquette. If you wanted to do this in a more appropriate way, you might say something like "Whoops, I meant X. I'll edit the parent comment to say so." and then edit the p... (read more)

I took Tristan to be using "sustainability" in the sense of "lessened environmental impact", not "requiring little willpower"

The section "Frame control" does not link to the conversation you had with wilkox, but I believe you intended for there to be one (you encourage readers to read the exchange). The link is here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Wiz4eKi5fsomRsMbx/change-my-mind-veganism-entails-trade-offs-and-health-is-one?commentId=uh8w6JeLAfuZF2sxQ

In the comment thread you linked, Elizabeth stated outright what she found misleading: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3Lv4NyFm2aohRKJCH/change-my-mind-veganism-entails-trade-offs-and-health-is-one?commentId=mYwzeJijWdzZw2aAg

Getting the paper author on EAF did seem like an unreasonable stroke of good luck.

I wrote out my full thoughts here, before I saw your response, but the above captures a lot of it. The data in the paper is very different than what you described. I think it was especially misleading to give all the caveats you did without

I don't think that's the central question here.

So far as I can tell, the central question Elizabeth has been trying to answer is "Do the people who convert to veganism because they get involved in EA have systemic health problems?" Those health problems might be easily solvable with supplementation (Great!), systemic to having a fully vegan diet but only requires some modest amount of animal product, or something more complicated. She has several self-reported people coming to her saying they tried veganism, had health problems, and stopped. So, "At wha... (read more)

I'm aware that people have written scientific papers that include the word vegan in the text, including the people at Cochrane. I'm confused why you thought that would be helpful. Does a study that relates health outcomes in vegans with vegan desistance exist, such that we can actually answer the question "At what rate do vegans desist for health reasons?"

Does such a study exist?

From what I remember of Elizabeth's posts on the subject, her opinion is the literature surrounding this topic is abysmal. To resolve the question of why some veg*ns desist, we would need one that records objective clinical outcomes of health and veg*n/non-veg*n diet compliance. What I recall from Elizabeth's posts was that no study even approaches this bar, and so she used other less reliable metrics.

I took your original comment to be saying "self-report is of limited value", so I'm surprised that you're confused by Elizabeth's response. In your second comment, you seem to be treating your initial comment to have said something closer to "self-report is so low value that it should not materially alter your beliefs." Those seem like very different statements to me.

Thanks!

If you're taking UI recommendations, I'd have been more decisive with my change if it said it was a one-time change.

Could I get rid of the (Previously GWS) in my username? I changed my name from GWS to this, and planned on changing it to just Stephen Bennett after a while, then as far as I can tell you removed the ability to edit your own username.

Obviously one trial isn’t conclusive, but I’m giving up on the water pick. Next step: test flossing.

Did you follow through on the flossing experiment?

Boy howdy was I having trouble with spoiler text on markdown.

I didn't provide quotes from my text when the mismatch was obvious enough from any read/skim of the text.

It was not obvious to me, although that's largely because after reading what you've written I had difficulty understanding what your position was at all precisely. It also definitely wasn't obvious to jimrandomh, who wrote that Elizabeth's summary of your position is accurate. It might be obvious to you, but as written this is a factual statement about the world that is demonstrably false.

My proposal is not suppressing public discussion of plant-ba

Audience

If you’re entirely uninvolved in effective altruism you can skip this, it’s inside baseball and there’s a lot of context I don’t get into.

Oh whoops, I misunderstood the UI. I saw your name under the confusion tag and thought it was a positive vote. I didn't realize it listed emote-downvotes in red.

Since I'm getting a fair number of confused reactions, I'll add some probably-needed context:

Some of Elizabeth's frustration with the EA Vegan discourse seems to stem from general commenting norms of lesswrong (and, relatedly, the EA forums). Specifically, the frustrations remind me of those of Duncan Sabien, who left lesswrong in part because he believed there was an asymmetry between commenters and posters wherein the commenters were allowed to take pot-shots at the main post, misrepresent the main post, and put forth claims they don't really endorse tha... (read more)

I encourage you to respond to any comment of mine that you believe...

• ...actively suppresses inconvenient questions with "fuck you, the truth is important."
• ...ignores the arguments you made with "bro read the article."
• ...leaves you in a fuzzy daze of maybe-disagreement and general malaise with "?????"
• ...is hostile without indicating a concrete disagreement of substance with "that's a lot of hot air"
• ...has citations that are of even possibly dubious quality with "legit?". And if you dig through one of my citations and think either I am misleading by in

This seems like a fairly hot take on a throwaway tangent in the parent post, so I'm very confused why you posted it. My current top contender is that it was a joke I didn't get, but I'm very low confidence in that.

I'm not Steven, but I know a handful of people who have no care for the truth and will say whatever they think will make them look good in the short term or give them immediate pleasure. They lie a lot. Some of them are sufficiently sophisticated to try to only tell plausible lies. For them debates are games wherein the goal is to appear victorious, preferably while defending the stance that is high status. When interacting with them, I know ahead of time to disbelieve nearly everything they say. I also know that I should only engage with them in debates/d... (read more)

That's the wrong search query, you're asking google to find pages about the Ukraine War that also include mentions of the term "rationalist"; you're not asking google to search for rationalist discussions of the Ukraine War. Instead I'd do something like this.

In the paper, they claim to be responding to people such as Charles Moser and Scott Alexander, and as I said Charles Moser and Scott Alexander are talking about AGP in trans women.

From my understanding, they're talking about AGP in natal males of any kind as compared to AGP in cis women. Scott and others found evidence of "yes, cis women have some AGP", whereas they find that the degree to which cis women have AGP is much less than those for whom AGP is a major component of their sexual life. I don't think it's crazy to then go on to say "no, really, wh... (read more)

Even if the specific point of AGP in cis women doesn't move you much (I don't think it should[2]), this dysfunctional discourse might make you tempted to infer that Blanchardians do a lot of other shenanigans to make their theories look better than they really are. And I think you would be right to make that inference, because I have a lot of points of critique on my gender blog that go unaddressed.[3] But my critiques aren't the core point I'm raising here, rather I'm pointing out that people have good reasons to be exhausted with autogynephilia the

If you're coming from the Rest Of The Internet, you may be surprised by hard far LessWrong takes this.

I believe this should say "surprised by how far"

Counterpoint while working within the metaphor: early speedruns usually look like exceptional runs of the game played casually, with a few impressive/technical/insane moves thrown in.

Would you actually prefer that all the jesters left (except the last one)?

I believe you when you say that interacting with the jesters is annoying in the moment. I trust that you do indeed anticipate having to drudge through many misconceptions of your writing when your mouse hovers over "publish". If you'll indulge an extended metaphor: it seems as though you're expressing displeasure at engaging in sorties to keep the farmland from burning even though it's the fortress you actually care about. People would question the legitimacy of the fortress if the s... (read more)

Is amelia currently able to respond to your comment, or is she unable to respond to comments on her post because she posted this? If so, that seems like a rather large flaw in the system. I realize you're working on a solution tailored to this, but perhaps a less clunky system could be used, such as a 7/week limit?

Yeah I agree, I think your post points at something distinct from Eternal September, but what Raemon was talking about seemed very similar.

This sounds like Eternal September to me.

One of my friends studied humor for a bit during his PhD, and my goodness is it difficult to get the average person to be funny with just "hey, tell me a joke" type prompts. Even when you hold their hand, and give them lots of potentially humorous pieces to work with (a-la cards against humanity), they really struggle. So, I'm honestly reasonably impressed with GPT-4's ability to occasionally tell a funny joke.

By the way, I disagree with the assumption that Aumann's theorem vindicates any such "standpoint epistemology".

That also stood out to me as a bit of a leap. It seems to me that for Aumann's theorem to apply to standpoint epistemology, everyone would have to share all their experiences and believe everyone else about their own experiences.

Fair enough. If I were to pay attention to them, that is probably what I would do. Fortunately I do not have to pay attention to them, so I can take their mockery at face value and condemn it for being mockery.

Yes, I even find most criticism useful.

I have never clicked on a link to sneerclub and then been glad I did so, so I'll pass.

Sneerclub is interested in sneering at me, it is not interested in bettering me. Why should I interpret their mockery as legitimate criticism?

If I'm reading this right, you object to Jensen's initial comment that uses "cringy" and that your objection is largely due to the fact that "cringy" is a property mostly about the observer (as opposed to the thing itself).

Do you think the same is true of "mind-killy" from logan's comment?

This seems hypocritical to me. I think that your real objection is something else, possibly that you just really don't like "cringy" for some other reason (perhaps you cringe at its usage?)

(I wrote a bunch more words but deleted them - let's see how nondefensive {offensiv... (read more)

I used to have a lot more fun writing, enjoying the vividness of language, and while I thank LessWrong for improving many aspects of my thinking, it has also stripped away almost all my verve for language. I think that's coming from the defensiveness-nuance complex I'm describing, and since the internet is what it is, I guess I'd like to start by changing myself. But my own self-advice may not be right for others.

I have about a 2:1 ratio of unsubmitted to submitted comments. The most common source of deletion is no longer really caring about what I have... (read more)

I'm not sure what happened here, but if I had to guess (in order of likelihood, not all are mutually exclusive):

• Bad joke (accident)

• Got flustered, said the first thing that popped into her head

• Bad joke (on purpose)

• Flirting

• Was actually watching porn, and thought that coming clean would in some way be better, or that saying the truth but in a weird way would mask the truth

• Wanted to get fired but didn't want to quit, somehow this was more socially acceptable than quitting

[Quote removed at Trevor1's request, he has substantially changed his comment since this one].

I expect that the opposite of this is closer to the truth. In particular, I expect that the more often power bends to reason, the easier it will become to make it do so in the future.

This post does three things simultaneously, and I think those things are all at odds with one another:

• Summarizes Duncan Sabien's post.

• Provides commentary on the post.

• Edits the post.

First, what is a summary and what are its goals? A summary should be a condensed and context-less version of the original that is shorter to read while still getting the main points across. A reader coming into a summary is therefore not expected to have any knowledge of the reference material. That reader shouldn't expect the level of detail that the source material... (read more)

I expect that if you actually ran this experiment, the answer would be a point because the ice cube would stop swinging before all that much melting had occurred. Additionally, even in situations where the ice cube swings indefinitely along an unchanging trajectory, warm sand evaporates drops of water quite quickly, so a trajectory that isn't a line would probably end up a fairly odd shape.

This is all because ice melting is by far the slowest of the things that are relevant for the problem.

I was feeling the beginning of sickness (slight fever, runny nose, scratchy throat) while at the airport around a year ago when returning from a trip. I made the same decision you did: prioritized masking, distance where feasible, and getting home as quickly as possible instead of taking on ~$1k of hotels/food to wait until I was healthy. I think I made the right decision and agree with yours here.

It turned out I had the ordinary flu, not covid. I don't think the prosocial decision making is substantially different between the flu & covid at this point in time.

it's confusing other people don't have this objection

For me, the cow has left the barn on "reality" referring only to the physical world I inhabit, so it doesn't register as inaccurate (although I would agree it's imprecise). "Reality" without other qualifiers points me towards "not fictional".

"emotional resonance" ... "shared facts" or "shared worldview"

I notice I'm resistant to these proposals, but was pretty happy about the term "shared reality". Here are some things I like about "shared reality" that I would be giving up if I adopted one of your... (read more)

No one clicks on links, maybe ~25% of users click even one in a giant post.

Two comments, with detail below: (1) make sure you have the relevant denominator and (2) be careful about taking action based on this information.

(1) What counts as a user in this context? Someone who comes to the page, reads a sentence, and then closes the page wouldn't even have time to click a link, for example, but they don't represent who your readership actually is. Similarly, users can end up double counted where, for example, they read through the post on their phone, and th... (read more)