All of wilkox's Comments + Replies

The reason medical progress is so slow is largely the types of people who, when they hear a woman cured her own cancer and published the results to benefit others, heroically advancing the cause of humanity at risk to only herself, warn of the dire ethical problems with that.

Often those people call themselves ‘ethicists.’ No, seriously, that is a thing, and that situation somehow rose to the level of a writeup in Nature, which calls self-experimentation an ‘ethically fraught practice.’

I'm as contemptuous as anyone of most 'bioethics', but this does g... (read more)

Katelyn Jetelina has been providing some useful information on this. Her conclusion at this point seems to be 'more data needed'.

The epistemology was not bad behind the scenes, it was just not presented to the readers. That is unfortunate but it is hard to write a NYT article (there are limits on how many receipts you can put in an article and some of the sources may have been off the record).

I'd have more trust in the writing of a journalist who presents what they believe to be the actual facts in support of a claim, than one who publishes vague insinuations because writing articles is hard.

Cade correctly informed the readers that Scott is aligned with Murray on race and IQ.

It seems like you think what Metz wrote was acceptable because it all adds up to presenting the truth in the end, even if the way it was presented was 'unconvincing' and the evidence 'embarassing[ly]' weak. I don't buy the principle that 'bad epistemology is fine if the outcome is true knowledge', and I also don't buy that this happened in this particular case, nor that this is what Metz intended.

If Metz's goal was to inform his readers about Scott's position, he failed. He didn't give any facts other than that Scott 'aligned himself with' and quoted someb... (read more)

The section on ‘How do you do it?’ looks like a generalised version of John Platt's Strong Inference, a method of doing science that he believed ‘makes for rapid and powerful progress’. The essence of Strong Inference is to think carefully about a scientific question (the goal) to identify the main competing hypotheses that have yet to be discriminated between (the blockers), and devise and perform experiment(s) that rapidly discriminate between them (taking responsibility to remove the blockers and actually perform the next step).

Strong inference consis

And, part of the point here is "it is very hard to talk about this kind of thing". And I think that if the response to this post is a bunch of "gotcha! You said this comment was bad in one particular way, but it's actually bad in an interestingly different way", that kinda feels like it proves Elizabeth right?

This seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I wrote a post that said:

It's common for people on LessWrong to accuse others of misquoting them. For example, just the other day, Elizabeth said:

wilkox is always misquoting me! He claimed that I said the

For several of the examples you give, including my own comments, your description of what was said seems to misrepresent the source text.

Active suppression of inconvenient questions: Martín Soto

The charitable explanation here is that my post focuses on naive veganism, and Soto thinks that's a made-up problem.

This is not a charitable or even plausible description of what Martín wrote, and Martín has described this as a 'hyperbolic' misrepresentation of their position. There is nowhere in the source comment thread that Martín claims or implies anything resem... (read more)

This sounds like you're saying "I won't prescribe B12 until my patient gives up oreos" or even "I won't prescribe B12 until everyone gives up oreos", which would be an awful way to treat people.^[1]

[...]

You probably mean "I don't think Elizabeth/anyone should spend time on veganism's problems, when metabolic issues are doing so much more aggregate harm."

I wouldn’t say either of these things. A quick and easy treatment like B12 replacement is not mutually exclusive with a long-term and difficult treatment like diet modification. (This is not an abstrac... (read more)

I absolutely agree. McDonalds and the other demons of the Western Diet cause much more harm, both in absolute terms and per capita. That was really my point; within the class of 'health misinformation and disinformation that causes harm', furphies about vegan nutrition are a comparatively minor problem.

You don't just have a level of access, you have a type of access. Your access to your own mind isn't like looking at a brain scan.

From my Camp 1 perspective, this just seems like a restatement of what I wrote. My direct access to my own mind isn't like my indirect access to other people's minds; to understand another person's mind, I can at best gather scraps of sensory data like ‘what that person is saying’ and try to piece them together into a model. My direct access to my own mind isn't like looking at a brain scan of my own mind; to understand a brain ... (read more)

Apologies for the repetition, but I'm going to start by restating a slightly updated model of what I think is going on, because it provides the context for the rest of my comment. Basically I still think there are two elements to our disagreement:

1. The Camp 1 vs Camp 2 disagreement. Camp 1 thinks that a description of the physical system would completely and satisfactorily explain the nature of consciousness and subjective experience; Camp 2 thinks that there is a conceptual element of subjective experience that we don't currently know how to explain in phys

I would not count "psychotic" here, since one is not necessarily directly acquainted with it (one doesn't necessarily know one has it).

Would it be fair to say then that by ‘mental states’ you mean ‘everything that the brain does that the brain can itself be aware of’?

I thought you saw the fact that beliefs are about something as evidence that they are easier to explain than experiences

I don't think there is any connection between whether a thought/belief/experience is about something and whether it is explainable. I'm not sure about ‘easier to explain’, bu... (read more)

Mental states do not need to be "about" something, but it is pretty clear they can be.

I'm still a bit confused by what you mean by ‘mental states’. My best guess is that you are using it as a catch-all term for everything that is or might be going on in the brain, which includes experiences, beliefs, thoughts, and more general states like ‘psychotic’ or ‘relaxed’.

I agree that mental states do not need to be about something, but I think beliefs do need to be about something and thoughts can be about something (propositional in the way you describe). I don't... (read more)

Huh, this is interesting. I wouldn't have suspected this to be the crux. I'm not sure how well this maps to the Camp 1 vs 2 difference as opposed to idiosyncratic differences in our own views.

In your view however, if I'm not misunderstanding you, beliefs are more similar to utterances than to experiences. So while I think beliefs are equally hard to explain as experiences, in your view beliefs are about as easy to explain as utterances. Is this a fair characterization?

This is a fair characterisation, though I don't think ease of explanation is a crucial po... (read more)

Okay, so you are saying that in the first-person case, the evidence for having a headache is not itself the experience of having a headache, but the belief that you have the experience of having a headache.

Not quite. I would say that in the first-person case, the explanandum – the thing that needs to be explained – is the belief (or thought, or utterance) that you have the experience of having a headache. Once you have explained how some particular set of inputs to the brain led to that particular output, you have explained everything that is going on, in ... (read more)

You’re absolutely right that this is the more interesting case. I intentionally chose the past tense to make it easier to focus on the details of the example rather than the Camp #1/Camp #2 distinction per se. For completeness, I'll try to recapitulate my understanding of Rafael's account for the present-tense case ‘I have a headache right now’.

From my Camp #1 perspective, any mechanistic description of the brain that explained why it generated the thought/belief/utterance ‘I have a headache right now’ instead of ‘I don’t have a headache right now’ in resp... (read more)

This is a clear and convincing account of the intuitions that lead to people either accepting or denying the existence of the Hard Problem. I’m squarely in Camp #1, and while I think the broad strokes are correct there are two places where I think this account gets Camp #1 a little wrong on the details.

According to Camp #1, the correct explanandum is still "I claim to have experienced X" (where X is the apparent experience). After all, if we can explain exactly why you, as a physical system, uttered the words "I experienced X", then there's nothing else to

Surely you don't think that's the right moral category for ethical veganism?

I don't really understand what you're asking here. How would you describe the moral category you're referring to, and why do you think it doesn't or shouldn't apply to veganism?

Thoughts on why the post gave (me) the impression it did, in no particular order:

• 'Trade-offs' is broad and vague, and the post didn't make a lot of detailed claims about vegan nutrition. This makes sense in the context of you trying to communicate the detailed facts previously, but coming to the post without that context made it hard to tell if you were just making an unobjectionable claim or trying to imply something broader.
• Some statements struck me as technically true but hyperbolic. Examples:

You can get a bit of all known nutrients from plants and fort

That is a frustrating situation. As you note in the introduction this is a charged topic that tends to lead to poor discussions, so you deserve credit for wading in anyway.

Given the context I laid out, is there anything I could have done to create a more productive discussion with you, personally?

I'm not sure. The discussion in this comment thread (and others) has been productive in the sense that I now have a much better understanding of your position and the context. In terms of the original post, I don't know if a one-sentence summary would have changed... (read more)

Thanks, this and your comment here helped a lot to clarify your position and intentions. My initial impression was similar to Natália's, i.e. that you believed something more like point 3.

Re. point 2, by "widely recognised" (and similarly for "widespread" in point 3) I meant something like "widely recognised in relevant academic literature/textbooks/among experts" rather than "among people who have ever tried a vegan diet". My impression is that on this definition you wouldn't endorse point 2 either.

We may still disagree on the "importance" of point 1, alt... (read more)

I don’t doubt the Faunalytics data. If anything the number seems surprisingly low, considering it comes from self-reporting among people who went on to quit veganism.

I’m not sure how to weigh ‘importance’ other than subjectively, but I’ll attempt to at least put bounds on it. As a floor, some number of people experience health issues that are important enough to them that they are motivated to quit veganism. As a ceiling, the health risks of veganism are less important than those of other harms related to diet – for example, dyslipidaemia or diabetes ... (read more)

I agree with this, though I would expand

there are plenty of points on this axis where people will seek help for heart-attacks but will be pessimistic about getting help with "vaguely feeling tired lately"

to note that heart attacks are on average a much more serious problem then vague fatigue, so the fact that people are more likely to see a doctor about the former is a good thing. People will generally self-select whether to seek medical help by the severity of the problem, and to the extent that they don't veganism is probably the least of their worries.

I'm confused- the issues you mention seem both important and, in most cases, extremely easy to fix. If there's a large population that is going vegan without the steps you mention (and my informal survey says there is), it seems high value to alert them to the necessity.

I suspect we have different intuitions as a matter of degree for ‘important’, ‘high value’, and ‘necessity’ here. Despite that, I think we would probably agree on a statement like ‘vegans who are not aware that their diet increases the risk of nutrient deficiencies would benefit from l... (read more)

I’ve been trying to figure out why I feel like I disagree with this post, despite broadly agreeing with your cruxes. I think it’s because it in the act of writing and posting this there is an implicit claim along the lines of:

Subtle nutritional issues that are specific to veganism can cause significant health harms, to a degree that it is worth spending time and energy thinking about this as ‘a problem’.

For context, I am both vegan and a doctor. Nutrient deficiencies are common and can cause anything ranging from no symptoms to vague symptoms to life-threa... (read more)

Have you considered melatonin? Quoting gwern:

Melatonin allows us a different way of raising the cost, a physiological & self-enforcing way. Half an hour before we plan to go to sleep, we take a pill. The procrastinating effect will not work - half an hour is so far away that our decision-making process & willpower are undistorted and can make the right decision (viz. following the schedule). When the half-hour is up, the melatonin has begun to make us sleepy. Staying awake ceases to be free, to be the default option; now it is costly to fight the melatonin and remain awake.

I use it for exactly this reason and it works brilliantly.

This is like saying "if evolution wants a frog to appear poisonous, the most efficient way to accomplish that is to actually make it poisonous". Evolution has a long history of faking signals when it can get away with it. If evolution "wants" you to signal that you care about the truth, it will do so by causing you to actually care about the truth if and only if causing you to actually care about the truth has a lower fitness cost than the array of other potential dishonest signals on offer.

I've noticed many people who practise meditation have a strong belief in meditation and the more 'rational' core of Buddhist practices, but only belief in belief about the new age-y aspects. My meditation teacher, for example, consistently prefaces the new age stuff with "in Buddhist teachings" or "Buddhists believe" ("Buddhists believe we will be reincarnated") while making other claims as simple statements of fact ("mindfulness meditation is a useful relaxation technique").

I appreciate this. I genuinely didn't (still don't ) understand what lessdazed was trying to say, and it would be a really bad thing if downvoting ignorance became common practice.

It's important to avoid the if-not-for-the-worst-waste-of-money-in-the-budget-the-most-worthy-unfunded-program-would-have-been-funded argument.

Can you explain why? This seems like a perfectly normal and reasonable sort of argument about dividing a limited pool of resources wisely.

Perhaps sparklines would work for this. They compress the recent history of a measurement in a space-efficient way which can fit inline with text.

This sounds a lot like the Scouting merit system, in a good way. I learned more life skills from Scouts then I ever did from public education.

This doesn't seem to be an answer to Wei Dai's question.

I recently introduced a friend to HPMR and she went on to discover Less Wrong entirely of her own accord. She has explicitly cited it as sparking her interest in things like Bayesian inference, which she would never have considered learning about before.

The link "summary" and the link "Here is a little more expanded text" seem to point to the same place, in my browser at least.

From the linked McDonald's coffee case article:

In addition, they awarded her $2.7 million in punitive damages. The jurors apparently arrived at this figure from [the burn victim's lawyer's] suggestion to penalize McDonald's for one or two days' worth of coffee revenues, which were about $1.35 million per day.

Talk about a brilliant use of anchoring...

I may also explain to them that if defending oneself receives the exact same penalty that attacking someone gets it will usually be best to initiate the combat yourself.

This is excellent advice, with the caveat that the school's disciplinary penalty is probably not the only cost. Being known as "the kid who walks expressionlessly up to other kids and punches them in the testicles without warning" may be a significant penalty too. (This doesn't mean striking first is always a bad strategy, just that it needs to be done carefully).

In any case, it is pretty clear that it is possible to hold rationality and religion in your head at the same time. This is basically how most people operate.

More generally, "In any case, it is pretty clear that it is possible to hold rationality and irrationality in your head at the same time. This is basically how most people operate." I'm no more surprised to hear about a religious rationalist than I am when I notice yet another of my own irrational beliefs or practices.

Mendeley is good for this, and specifically designed for managing a library of academic papers. It supports tagging and full text searches, as well as some half-baked "social" features which can be safely ignored. The most useful feature for me is that it can watch a directory for new papers, and add them to its library as well as my directory tree (author/year/paper). It can also maintain a bibtex file for the entire library which is handy for citations.

Good point. Reading my comment again, it seems obvious that I committed the typical mind fallacy in assuming that it really is a choice for most people.

Missionary work, including LDS, has a phenomenally low success rate. I don't recall it, but from memory a missionary might convert 1-2 people per year based on cold calls.

A one year doubling or tripling time doesn't strike me as "phenomenally low".

This was what confirmed Eliezer's skill as a writer in my mind. He resisted the (typical nerdish) impulse to vomit out pages of obsessively detailed explanations, instead leading the reader on with tantalising hints spaced far apart. It probably accounts for a lot of the book's notorious addictiveness.

"things that people say that really actionable beliefs even though they may not be clear on the difference"

This sounds interesting, but I can't parse it.

In any case there really isn't any reason to be offended and especially there is no reason to allow the other person to provoke you to anger or acting without thought.

It seems really, really difficult to convey to people who don't understand it already that becoming offended is a choice, and it's possible to not allow someone to control you in that way. Maybe "offendibility" is linked to a fundamental personality trait.

Agreed, with the addendum that in this context there seems as much disagreement over the definition of "possible" as the definition of "omnipotent".

This bothered me too. If 'omnipotent' is defined as 'able to do things which can be done', we're all gods.

The difference between activation energy and inertia is that you can want to do something, but be having a hard time getting started - that's activation energy. Whereas inertia suggests you'll keep doing what you've been doing, and largely turn your mind off. Breaking out of inertia takes serious energy and tends to make people uncomfortable.

I don't mean to nitpick, but this distinction isn't obvious to me. It seems like inertia is just a component of activation energy.

Great post regardless.

This problem is compounded when the students feel obliged to stay in the class even if they're not getting anything out of it. The result is a room full of tired, frustrated students terrified of being "found out" or giving the wrong answer. I encourage my undergrad students to leave and work on a problem later if their brains just aren't up to the job, but they never do. It's not clear if this is because of years of authoritarian schooling, or if they just don't trust themselves to do the work outside of a classroom.

Thank you very much for doing this. You've clearly put a lot of effort into making it both thorough and readable.

Formulate methods of validating the SIAI’s execution of goals.

Seconded. Being able to measure the effectiveness of the institute is important both for maintaining the confidence of their donors, and for making progress towards their long-term goals.

I'm also not sure why the position of her eyes is supposed to be relevant to any of this.

Maybe something to do with the facial asymmetry JanetK mentions here?