Instead of imagining if all trials were bench trials, instead perform the experiment. Or just look at the countries where this is true!
Douglas_Knight
What does it mean to claim that these people are contrarians?
Is there a consensus position at all? For any existing policy, you could claim that there is some kind of centrist compromise that it’s a good policy, so people who propose changing policy, like Hanson and Caplan, are defying that compromise. But there is not really any explicit consensus goal of most policies, so claiming existing institutions are a bad compromise because they pursue multiple goals and separating those goals is not in defiance of any consensus. Caplan, Hanson, and Sailer are offensive because they feel we should try to understand the world and try steer it. They may be wrong, but the people opposed to them rarely offer an opposing position, but are rather opposed to any position. It seems to me that the difference between true and false is much smaller than the gap between argument and pseudoscience. Maybe Sailer is wrong, but the consensus position that he is peddling pseudoscience is much more wrong and much more dangerous.
Sailer rarely argues for genetic causes, but leaves that to the psychologists. He believes it and sometimes he uses the hypothesis, but usually he uses the hypotheses 1-4 that Turkheimer, Harden, and Nisbett concede. Spelling out the consequences of those claims is enough to unperson him. Maybe he’s wrong about these, but he’s certainly not claiming to be a contrarian. And people who act like these are false rarely acknowledge an academic consensus. Or compare Jay: it’s very hard to distinguish genetic effects from systemic effects, so when Jay argues that racial IQ gaps aren’t genetic, he is (explicitly!) arguing that they are caused by racial differences in parenting. Sailer often claims this (he thinks it’s half the effect), but people hate this just as much as anything else he says. Calling him a contrarian and focusing attention on one claim seem like an attempt to mislead.
That is a very clear example, but I think something similar is going on in the rest. Guzey seems to have gone overboard in reaction to Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep. Did that book represent a consensus? I don’t know, but it was concrete enough to be wrong, which seems to me much better than an illusion of a consensus.
That they have a “real names” policy is a blatant lie.
They withhold “real names” every day, even ones so “obvious” as to be in wikipedia. If they hate the subject, such as Virgil Texas, they assert that it is a pen name. Their treatment of Scott is off the charts hostile.
If we cannot achieve common knowledge of this, what is the point of any other detail?
How about cancer deaths? From the point of view of 2012, was Beau Biden’s death in 2015 after diagnosis in 2013 due to quantum randomness? That sure had a big effect on the Democratic primary, if not the general election.
Sure, but this is not new. You start by saying “AI in 2024” but this is true of everything that has been called AI and a lot of things that maybe should have been called AI, such as the PageRank algorithm. Credit scores have made decisions based on based on statistical models since the 50s.
That sounds pretty similar to sublingual therapy. I think it is likely that sublingual therapy is better because of the denser dosing (weekly vs monthly), but the difference is small enough that it can only be assessed with a head-to-head trial. (If the difference is compliance, it would be difficult to measure, though potentially very large.)
The headline that environmental allergies are curable is a decades old. If this news has not spread, it is good that you promote it, but we should ponder why it is not common knowledge.
The medical consensus is that sublingual immunotherapy is inferior to the injected immunotherapy that has been used for a century. Did you try that as a kid? If there’s reason to believe sublingual is better, that’s good to know, but it sounds like you just don’t know about injections.
Sublingual immunotherapy has an obvious advantage because people don’t like shots. And it doesn’t require a prescription. Indeed, one should be suspicious of a conflict of interest in the medical consensus. But injected doses are more precisely controlled, so there is good reason to believe they work better. And the doses are smaller, so the material cost is smaller.
Compliance to the schedule may be the main obstacle. It is not obvious whether doctor appointments make this better or worse. This probably varies between people.
What the legal system should be is irrelevant.
In the post you talked about editing all 237 loci to make diabetes negligible, but now you talk about the normal human range. I think that is more correct. Editing all 237 loci would leave the normal human range; the effect on diabetes would be unpredictable and the probability of bad effects likely. Not because of pleiotropy, but just the breakdown of a control system outside of its tested regime.
First of all, the population numbers are complete garbage. This is completely circular. You are just reading out the beliefs about history used to fabricate them. The numbers are generated by people caring about the fall of Rome. The fall of Rome didn’t cause of decline in China. Westerners caring about the fall of Rome caused the apparent decline in China.
Second, there was a tremendous scientific and technological regress in Rome. Not caused by the fall of Rome, but the rise of Rome. There was a continual regress in the Mediterranean from 150BC to at least 600AD. Just look at a list of scientists: it has a stark gap 150BC-50AD. It is more controversial to say that the renaissance 50AD-150AD is a pale shadow of the Hellenistic period, but it is. In 145BC Rome fomented a civil war in Egypt, destroying Alexandria, the greatest center of learning. In 133BC, the king of Pergamon tried to avoid this fate by donating the second center of learning. It was peaceful, but science did not survive.
Since those are rare causes of deaths, they don’t matter and they’re hard to measure. Also, this is a small study, so I trust earlier studies more.
There is a mechanistic explanation. Alcohol is a blood thinner. Blood thinners protect from ischemic heart disease, which is such a large portion of mortality a small improvement can make up for worsening of all other causes. Which is exactly what we see in the observation.
It’s that simple.
Before asking why, ask what. Why did the technological growth of ancient Rome not snowball into the industrial revolution? I reject the premise. Rome was a period of regress in both physical technology and social organization, although it did spread some technology westward.
More generally, the macro trends of history are largely fabricated to prove the desired conclusion that there is always exponential progress, except in a few collapses that are so sharp that they cannot be denied. Why did this growth not produce the industrial revolution? Because it wasn’t progress.
Slaves reproducing themselves is nonmalthusian, but rare. Romans captured slaves in war and enslaved debtors. I think the only time in history chattel slaves reproduced themselves is the New World, which was quite nonmalthusian.
This is a very popular theory, but it seems to predict way too much. The Greeks and Romans did have animal powered wells and mills. They had water mills and water saws. They probably had windmills.
Yeah, FTX seems like a totally ordinary financial crime. You don’t need utilitarianism or risk neutrality to steal customer money or take massive risks.
LaSota and Leverage said that they had high standards and were doing difficult things, whereas SBF said that he was doing the obvious things a little faster, a little more devoted to EV.
The hard part is being willing to call papers bad. The task I find difficult is getting people to acknowledge that I called them bad, rather than gaslighting me.
Someone just told me that the solution to conflicting experiments is more experiments. Taken literally this is wrong: more experiments just means more conflict. What we need are fewer experiments. We need to get rid of the bad experiments.
Why expect that future experiments will be better? Maybe if the experimenters read the past experiments, they could learn from them. Well, maybe, but maybe if you read the experiments today, you could figure out which ones are bad today. If you don’t read the experiments today and don’t bother to judge which ones are better, what incentive is there for future experimenters to make better experiments, rather than accumulating conflict?
France had a military coup in 1958 followed by 6 months of dictatorship. What threshold had France not passed in 1958 to not count as a full democracy? Does the Dictator’s Handbook actually say this?
What you say about OpenAI makes it the apotheosis of EA and thus I think it would be better for 80k to endorse it to make that clear, rather than to perform the kayfabe of fake opposition.