followthesilence
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May be a Rorschach... For me, of the dozen or so things i thought about replacing dragons with, "race science" wasn't one of them
Thanks for the intro to Figgie. It makes sense that it's a better game to teach trading concepts given it was designed specifically to teach trading interns, has its own trading platform with bid-ask pricing, and all the other good reasons you mention above.
I would take issue with the first part ("poker is a bad game for teaching epistemics"), especially relative to the universe of well-known games out there. To address your criticisms:
In poker, most decisions don't give you feedback about whether you were right for the right reasons.
This strikes me as more feature than bug. Just as it can be "to your advantage to hide how you're playing certain combinations of... (read 525 more words →)
I'm highly skeptical that it's even possible to create omnicidal machines. Can you point empirically to a single omnicidal machine that's been created? What specifically would an OAL-4 machine look like? Whatever it is, just don't do that. To the extent you do develop anything OAL-4, we should be fine so long as certain safeguards are in place and you encourage others not to develop the same machines. Godspeed.
Post hoc probability calculations like these are a Sisyphean task. There are infinite variables to consider, most can't be properly measured, even ballparked.
On (1), pandemics are arguably more likely to originate in large cities because population density facilitates spread, large wildlife markets are more likely, and they serve as major travel hubs. I'm confused why the denominator is China's population for (1) but all the world's BSL-4 labs in (3). I don't understand the calculation for (2)... that seems the opposite of "fairly easy to get a ballpark figure for." Ditto for (4).
Rootclaim sold the debate as a public good that would enhance knowledge but ultimately shirked responsibility to competently argue for one side of the debate, so it was a very one-sided affair that left viewers (and judges) to conclude this was probably natural origin. Several people on LW say the debate has strongly swayed them against lab leak.
The winning argument (as I saw it) came down to Peter's presentation of case mapping data (location and chronology) suggesting an undeniable tie to the seafood market. Saar did little to undercut this, which was disappointing because the Worobey paper and WHO report have no shortage of issues. Meanwhile, Peter did his homework on basically... (read more)
Zoonotic will win this debate because Peter outclassed Saar on all fronts, from research/preparation to intelligibly engaging with counterclaims and judge's questions.
Saar seemed too focused on talking his book and presenting slides with conditional probability calculations. He was not well-versed enough in the debate topics to defend anything when Peter undercut a slide's assumptions, nor was he able to poke sufficient holes in Peter's main arguments. Peter relied heavily on case mapping data, and Saar failed to demonstrate the ascertainment bias inherent to that data. He even admitted he did no follow-up research after the initial presentation.
I get the sense Saar either thought lab leak was so self-evident that showing the judges... (read more)
Yes, by virtue of the alliance with the "top virologists".
In Feb 2020 Anthony Fauci convened a bunch of virologists to assess SARS-CoV-2 origins. The initial take from the group (revealed in private Slack messages via FOIA requests from 2023) was this was likely engineered. In Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research's view, it was "so friggin likely because they were already doing this work."
The same month, Fauci held an off-the-record call with the group. After that, everyone's tunes changed and shortly after (in a matter of weeks) we got the Proximal Origins paper, with Kristian Andersen doing a 180 as the lead author. The paper posits that there is "strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation." I encourage... (read more)
The Metaculus point scoring system incentivizes* middling predictions that would earn you points no matter the outcome (or at least provide upside in one direction with no point downside if you're wrong) so that would encourage participants with no opinion/knowledge on the matter to blindly predict in the middle.
Harder to explain with real money markets, but Peter's explanation is a good one. Also, for contracts closing several months or years out where the outcome is basically known, they will still trade at a discount to $0.99 because time value of money and opportunity cost of tying up capital in a contract that has very low prospective ROI.
*Haven't been on the site in a while but this was at least true as of a few months ago.
The disagreement here seems to be around how literally one should interpret the metaphor.
I agree depression could be more accurately described as "lack of caring" than "must do endless puzzles". However, the purpose of the post is to describe the depressive experience to people who cannot relate.
To that end, I like the sudoku metaphor. If you tell someone "depression means I just don't care and can't muster willpower to do things I should/need to do" a lot of people may -- consciously or not -- judge this as a voluntary condition where the solution approximates to "have you tried caring?"
Sudokus help illustrate the (what feels like) involuntary roadblocks to otherwise simple life processes, the way these roadblocks ramify insidiously into more sub-components of life over time, and the level of fatigue, suffering, and defeat this inflicts.