Andrew_Clough

• Andrew_CloughApr 4, 2020, 3:40 PM

  4 points

  on: How cred­ible is the the­ory that COVID19 es­caped from a Wuhan Lab?

  The people on This Week in Virology seemed convinced that the spike protein wasn’t anything that had previously been seen and wasn’t anything a human would design if they were working on creating a new virus.

  SARS-Covid-2 doesn’t look at all like a biological weapon. If they were dong experiments on trying to design a novel spike I don’t think they’d do it in such an otherwise dangerous virus.

  I can imagine that this virus infected someone in China, was brought to the lab for analysis then escape from the lab into Wuhan but that’s a lot of burdensome details. And my guess is that if they’d had the virus in a lab then the overall response would have looked different but that’s weak evidence.

  So overall I’d say it isn’t impossible but I’d give less than 1% odds.

• Andrew_CloughOct 20, 2007, 7:53 PM

  3 points

  on: Pas­cal’s Mug­ging: Tiny Prob­a­bil­ities of Vast Utilities

  I think that if you consider that the chance of a threat to cause a given amount of disutility being valid is a function of the amount of disutility then the problem mostly goes away. That is, in my experience any threat to cause me X units of disutility where X is beyond some threshold is less than ¹⁄₁₀ as credible as a threat to cause me 1 unit of disutility. If someone threatened to kill another person unless I gave them $5000 I would be worried. If they threatened to kill 10 poeple I would be very slightly less worried. If they threatened to kill 1000 people I would be roughly 10 times less worried. If they threatened to kill 1,000,000 people I wouldn’t pay any attention at all. Taking these data points and extrapolating I form the heuristic that the chance of someone threatening me with X units of disutility over a threshold based on how much they are demanding and whether I can fulfill that demand decreases faster than linearly.

  [i]Nothing could possibly be that weak.[/​i]

  On the contrary, I think it is not only that weak but actually far weaker. If you are willing to consider the existance of things like 3^^^3 units of disutility without considering the existence of chances like 1/​4^^^4 then I believe that is the problem that is causing you so much trouble.

• Andrew_CloughSep 8, 2007, 10:29 PM

  14 points

  on: The Crack­pot Offer

  I expect that many people who grew up to be scientists and mathematicians attempted to create famous proofs when they were young, but I also expect that for many engineers such as myself our youthful folly went more along the direction of perpetual motion machines. I’d actually like to see some research on what the correlations really are.