This piece relates to this manifold market and these videos
I listened to most of the 17+ hours of the debate and found it mostly interesting, informative and important for someone either interested in COVID origins or practicing rationality.
I came into this debate about 65-80% lab leak, and left feeling <10% is most likely.
Key takeaways
The big picture of the lab leak is easy to understand and sounds convincing, however the details don’t check out when put under scrutiny.
Both sides attempted Bayesian estimates and probabilities and got absolutely absurd differences in estimates.
Rootclaim failed to impress me—the takeaway I got is that they are well suited to say murder cases where there is history to go off, but when it comes to such a large messy, one-off event as COVID origins they didn’t know what evidence to include, how to properly weight it etc. They didn’t present a coherent picture of why we should accept their worldview and estimates. An example is where they asserted that even if Zoonosis was the origin then the claimed market was not the origin because the details of infected animals and humans wasn’t what they expected. This seems an absurd claim to make with confidence judging on the data available. When forced to build models (rather than rely on multiplying probabilities) they were bad at it and overconfident in their conclusions from such models.
More generally this led me to distrust Bayesian inference type methods in complicated situations. Two smart reasonably well prepared positions could be off by say >1e12 in relative estimates. Getting all the details right, building consistent models that are peer reviewed by experts cannot be made up for by giving uncertainties to things.
Regarding AI, I have now more sympathy to the claim that P(Doom) is a measure of how the individual feels, rather than a defensible position on what the odds actually are.
Rootclaim covid origins debate:
This piece relates to this manifold market
and these videos
I listened to most of the 17+ hours of the debate and found it mostly interesting, informative and important for someone either interested in COVID origins or practicing rationality.
I came into this debate about 65-80% lab leak, and left feeling <10% is most likely.
Key takeaways
The big picture of the lab leak is easy to understand and sounds convincing, however the details don’t check out when put under scrutiny.
Both sides attempted Bayesian estimates and probabilities and got absolutely absurd differences in estimates.
Rootclaim failed to impress me—the takeaway I got is that they are well suited to say murder cases where there is history to go off, but when it comes to such a large messy, one-off event as COVID origins they didn’t know what evidence to include, how to properly weight it etc. They didn’t present a coherent picture of why we should accept their worldview and estimates. An example is where they asserted that even if Zoonosis was the origin then the claimed market was not the origin because the details of infected animals and humans wasn’t what they expected. This seems an absurd claim to make with confidence judging on the data available. When forced to build models (rather than rely on multiplying probabilities) they were bad at it and overconfident in their conclusions from such models.
More generally this led me to distrust Bayesian inference type methods in complicated situations. Two smart reasonably well prepared positions could be off by say >1e12 in relative estimates. Getting all the details right, building consistent models that are peer reviewed by experts cannot be made up for by giving uncertainties to things.
Regarding AI, I have now more sympathy to the claim that P(Doom) is a measure of how the individual feels, rather than a defensible position on what the odds actually are.