Brand new account, reposting old arguments? Not suspicious at all.
Stoyan and Chiu (2024)
"Just because the market was the epicenter doesn't mean the pandemic started there," while technically true, is fairly meaningless. If the center were at the lab every lab leak proponent would be shouting at the top of their lungs this conclusively proves the lab leak theory. Debating one particular statistical analysis doesn't disprove the very elementary technique of "look at the data, it's obvious" aka https://xkcd.com/2400/.
The multiple spillover theory might ...
They're not equally unlikely. You haven't provided any actual evidence for this claim.
Also, why on Earth would we just take the ratio of distances or areas as the probability factor? That's not how pandemics work.
ICUs were overwhelmed because Covid spread so much. Its hospitalization rate is a few percent and its fatality rate is 1% or so. This is in contrast to diseases like SARS 1 (9.5% fatality rate) or MERS (34% fatality rate). Sure, it's not mild compared to seasonal flu, but it is much more mild than the obvious things you would compare it to.
The second thing would be surprising as if the virus can so often jump to humans from animals it will happen closer to its origin in Laos.
Spillover events probably did happen elsewhere, but not all spillover events lead to a pandemic, and covid is usually so mild that it's not surprising we can't find any such cases. (I also don't know if some final important mutation didn't happen until much closer to the actual pandemic start).
Alternative explanation is following: as the market is one of the most crowded place in the city
This is discussed in the Ro...
What would the disjunctive fallacy be? Failing to account for the fact that P(A or B) >= P(A) and P(B)?
At one point Miller gave a likelihood against LL by a factor of 1e20 or 1e25, I think during the second debate, on genetic evidence. I don't think he intended this number to be an actual Bayes factor, but rather to show how easy it is to get a big BF by multiplying many small numbers together (see also https://arbital.com/p/multiple_stage_fallacy/).
I would like to see what Roko has to say about my post, so now I'm very curious how this works. Is this saying that you get rate-limited if you have at least 7 people downvoting you in the past 20 comments, regardless of how many people upvote you or how many times those 7 people vote? Also, does this count both overall and agreement karma?
What facility? WIV and HSM are at least 6 miles apart as the crow flies, with a big river between that forces anyone traveling from one to the other to go even further than that.
To override this we need some mental equlibristics (I think of meme here but I don't want to be rude)
No, you just need stronger evidence. 1/20 isn't that strong, especially for a complex situation with a high number of possible parameters to check.
To make sure I understand your point... the "Bayes Factors" I give like 1/ 1 million aren't meant to be taken literally. Rather they're to show how easy it is to get a high BF in this case, if you do a very quick analysis that doesn't account for details. I don't expect this post, on its own, to convince anyone of the zoonotic origin hypothesis.
I would describe that as dismissing counter-evidence out of hand; it's trivially easy to answer the question as stated, even if you don't believe that particular story. In any event, this seems like arguing over semantics. I think that accusing someone of a being responsible for several million deaths requires quite strong evidence, and that a pretty key component of presenting strong evidence is seriously addressing counter-arguments and counter-evidence. None of Roko's posts do that.
...[It seems to me like you're arguing he's making procedural errors
I don't think that's counts as tremendous certainty.
"Brute Force Manufactured consensus is hiding the Crime of the Century (emphasis mine). Although the post contains the statement "I believe" it doesn't really express any other reservations, qualifiers, or uncertainty. It doesn't present or consider any evidence for the alternatives.
this is really not a tremendous amount either.
It certainly seems like it's supposed to a lot:
...For the love of Bayes! How many times do you have to rerun history for a naturally occurring virus to randoml
What the social consensus is and why it exists are not relevant to the point I was making. This post is accusing specific individuals of mass murder, claiming they are responsible for millions of deaths. If you just want to say that you don't believe the expert consensus, that's one thing, but that just leaves you in a state of uncertainty. This post expresses a tremendous amount of certainty, and the mere fact that debate was stifled cannot possibly demonstrate that the stifled side is actually correct.
I think it's plausible--perhaps even likely--th...
This is the kind of thing you do before you make a big post accusing someone of "the crime of the century." I don't know how you even thought this was remotely reasonable. This is basically just Pascal's mugging, except that the worst you can do is harm the reputation of the community... "pay me or I might make really bad posts."
Ok. I don't think that Roko necessarily thought of the situation that way; rather, I thought if it as a way to contextualize what a 1:1000 probability of a natural bat coronavirus pandemic starting in Wuhan meant.
Your first comment seemed to take the position that the OP's number was not merely different from yours, but indefensible, and you gave a lower bound for a defensible prior that was 1.4x higher than the number you were complaining about.
Are you claiming the timing argument is so weak that no reasonable person could possibly estimate its Bayes factor as >1.4? I don't feel like you've come close to justifying a claim like that.
Roko gave a fairly high-level argument that didn't dive too much into the details. I don't believe it is possible for such a...
This is a period of about 2 years out of the entire 1920-2020 hundred-year window. Now, we could probably discount that hundred year window down to say an equivalent of 40 years as people have become more mobile and more numerous in China over the past 100 years, on average.
I did see this, but didn't find it convincing. China has become substantially more urban, more interconnected, more populous, and more connected to the outside world even over the past 10 or 20 years. A claim like this requires substantially more thorough analysis. And, again, is it rea...
"What kind of disease" has Bayes Factor 1. It's exactly the kind of disease that has caused pandemics in the same region of the world within the past 20 years, and which comes from the kind of wild animal trade that has been known to be happening in Wuhan for years. I discussed this in the very next paragraph.
The timing is given by such a weak argument that I did ignore it, yes. WIV has been studying bat coronaviruses for years, and probably will continue to do so for years, and the only thing to tie it so closely in time is a rejected grant proposal...
... and we're supposed to believe that this is a coincidence? For the love of Bayes! How many times do you have to rerun history for a naturally occurring virus to randomly appear outside the lab that's studying it at the exact time they are studying it? I think it's at least 1000:1 against.
When I was thinking about this question earlier, I was imagining explaining my reasons to various different people (I think that imagining their response sometimes allows me to come up with counterarguments that otherwise I wouldn't think of). One of the things I w...
I think it is Roko's obligation to do a better job of researching and addressing counter-arguments before making a post like this one. It contains absolutely nowhere near sufficient justification for the accusations it is leveling.
So, from my perspective there are two different issues, one epistemic, and the one game-theoretic.
From the epistemic perspective, I would like to know (as part of a general interest in truth) what the true source of the pandemic was.
From the game-theoretic perspective, I think we have sufficiently convincing evidence that someone attempted to cover up the possibility that they were the source of the pandemic. (I think Roko's post doesn't include as much evidence as it could: he points to the Lancet article but not the part of it that's calling lab leak a c...
"I think this is flawed. Clearly, overeating for your entire life will probably have different effects from overeating for 22 days. There are a lot of 22-day periods in a person’s life. Someone on their 30th birthday has gone through nearly 500 of them."
This is true, but doesn't the same critique apply to most of the hypoxia studies you cite? They're all a few weeks or shorter (or are performed on animals) and most of them seem to have small effect sizes (a few pounds). Of course, these effects could accumulate, but they could also rebound.
"In fact, ...
Growth rates decrease as you go back in time, plus you start to hit problems like mass loss of wealth, wealth confiscation, war, natural disaster, etc.
If you think these area issues going forward, then they apply equally well to all longtermist arguments.
(I'm not actually sure if e.g. median income is positively associated with elevation in the US, since a bunch of those people are "ski bums" working a series of seasonal jobs at ski resorts, white water rafting companies, etc. I used the word class because I think those people are still disproportionately drawing from upper-class cultures and probably have high education on average, and there are definitely a lot of rich people hanging around as well, and the latter are more likely to live closer to the resorts. Mean income is definitely higher in those ar...
I have no idea, although I expect any such effect to be a very long-term thing and thus tricky to design and measure.
Long ago, when SSC had an article about the altitude/obesity thing, a friend and I looked more closely at the data. I concluded that it seems like the bulk of the effect is explainable by selection effect, since there are very few people who live above a few thousand feet elevation, and they're probably disproportionately upper class and active. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/11/open-thread-64-5/#comment-443619 (and the original post at https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/05/thin-air/). I'm serious about these selection effects--the data linked in m...
When I looked into it, you could see an effect on birthweight for babies born to mothers in high altitudes vs their lower-altitude siblings, and vice versa, which suggests to me something non-genetic is going on. And the effect of altitude on birth weight held up in countries where altitude was associated with both lower and higher income (although that wasn't the sibling study), which pushes against and doesn't eliminate income effects.
The mechanism tying elevation to pollution is allegedly that elevation is a proxy for how upstream you are in the water cycle, since water will accumulate toxins from the ground or being pumped into the water as it goes. To me, this seems like an extremely loose association.
I agree, but moreover it looks like it should be an easy theory to test. My guess is that there are basically three routes for contaminants to enter our body and make us fat. The chemicals could be in the air, the water, or our food. If the SMTM authors believe that it's in our water, then drinking distilled or purified water should make us thinner. Do we have any evidence of this?
Hold on. That seems to be very wrong. The world became permanently more dangerous when smallpox, cholera, typhoid, measles, mumps, and the flu jumped to humans. That only stopped being true when vaccines were developed. I think it bodes pretty well for the outlook of COVID, if we keep vaccinating. But so far as I know, it's definitely not the case that smallpox ever became less deadly on its own.
I'm not sure it's any more dead than other fields of social science. Which, maybe they're all actually zombies, but that sounds excessively strong. For example, take the effect sizes of nudges. I believe that the effect of "opt out" policies for organ donation have absolutely massive effects (see https://sparq.stanford.edu/solutions/opt-out-policies-increase-organ-donation ). So is the problem that the field is dead, or that it's just sick with the same diseases as psychology and better work needs to be done to separate wheat from chaff? Forgetting hypothe...
I've spent a lot of time in the outdoors and I'm surprised that "ticks" occupied such a large chunk of effort/relevance. Wear long pants/shirts with long sleeves when in the woods, check yourself after you get back, and put bug spray (there are certain brands that work) on your body and clothes.
I'm curious what counts as "very high elevation" and why it's an issue. The highest cities of any size are Santa Fe, Denver and the Front Range (including Cheyenne), and SLC. You can get some very high elevations right outside Denver, but there are no towns ab...
Or explain why the NYT does use the chosen name of other people, like musicians' stage names.