Sometimes you say cancer and sometimes you say deadly cancer. How careful were you to distinguish these? My understanding is that sun exposure is positively correlated with melanoma and negatively correlated with melanoma deaths.
Douglas_Knight
Karma: 7,878
Semmelweis and Wegener are not so good examples because they were met with explicit rejection. I don’t like the example of Serpico, but I have trouble articulating my objection. Did he ever doubt himself? If he started at the top of a slippery slope, he explored all the way to the bottom and stopped doubting himself. He said he was subject to ridicule. I think it would matter whether he was condemned for having impossibly high standards or whether people simply defended bribery as a perk of policing.
What is bad about this? You only get to that in the last paragraph. I can’t quite tell what you mean. There seem to be two topics. One is doom and the other is job loss. These are totally different issues. If AI use is contributing to doom, that is bad. I doubt it, but let’s leave it aside. The rest of the paragraph seems to be about job loss. This seems like a general argument against technology. Do you really endorse the general argument? If not, what is the difference with AI?
The Pentagon said in court that they did it because of Anthropic’s actions in the press. It would not be surprising if before they said that in court they wrote memos saying that. But if (as I predict) these are very recent memos, they tell us nothing about the real reason. The judge is taking them at their word and interpreting tweets (eg, “master class in arrogance”) as being about that. I don’t think those tweets were about the public conversation at all. In any event, they were after the designation was mentioned in the press, so are not evidence about the Pentagon’s motivation for the designation.
I think it is probably true that some people at the Pentagon saw unfavorable press treatment of their own leaks and assumed that they were Anthropic leaks. Possibly because other people at the Pentagon lied to them. But they were already talking about the designation before that.
The first mention in the press of the supply chain risk designation is on 2026-02-16 in Axios. It was explicitly named as punishment “for forcing our hand,” which is unclear, but doesn’t sound like public scrutiny.
You got the impression because Michael wanted you to. But he is a liar, so don’t attempt to extract any sense in which there is a kernel of truth.
I addressed your parenthetical in my comment. I think the negotiation began after the election. The Biden officials could have shaped the deal, but Palantir and the generals knew that they were temporary.
That is ridiculous. It was the Pentagon that went to the press, not Anthropic. And the Pentagon explicitly told the press that they were punishing Anthropic for refusing the contract, not for talking about it.
Anthropic signed its contract with the Government in July 2025, the current administration, not the previous administration. It announced its partnership with Palantir a couple days after the election, probably to identify the new administration before beginning negotiations for this very reason.
Good call. The follow up is not entirely clear, but it looks like the teacher was trying to simulate an attack that the student could investigate.
It’s one thing to say “I know X is controversial, but I want to assume it and talk about the consequences.” But saying that there “this article is for people who know X and not the ignorant” leaves it fair game to attack X.
I have a different complaint. Saying “Epstein stuff” and not being specific could create an alliance between people who believe contradictory things. This is a common pattern. For a crisp example, consider anti-carb as an alliance between people who think glucose is fine and fructose is poison with people who think the opposite.
I am skeptical of the framing “this episode” and the relevance of the Venezuela raid. The
PentagonWhite House has been complaining about Anthropic since September. There is a Pentagon memo dated 1⁄9 that talks about rewriting contracts to use the phrase “any lawful use.”
It is not clear about OpenAI, but it was never clear about Anthropic. The news coverage has never mentioned any details about enforcement, only the words in the contract. The closest we get is the claim that the Pentagon was upset that Antropic was asking questions of Palantir, which means that Antropic doesn’t have any direct channel to learn about lines being crossed.
In 2020, the DPA was used to order car companies to manufacture ventilators, a new product. Not for the military, but is that really the relevant detail? The car companies wanted to make ventilators anyhow, so it probably had no effect, but, in principle, this is the most extreme version of DPA.
I think your output number is correct, but all your inputs incorrect (in the same direction, not canceling!).
A few thousand nuclear weapons is too low even today. The peak number was about 60k. Maybe most of the bombs are aimed at rural areas, but how many are aimed at cities? 40%? First strike bombs should be aimed at military targets, but aren’t second strike missiles aimed at populations in revenge? Doesn’t RAND famously talk about cities as hostages? I believe Ellsberg’s book claims that an awful lot of first strike planning was aimed at cities, probably most.
But when Ellsberg asked the Pentagon in 1960 what would be the death toll, they estimated 600 million, evenly divided between the two sides, about 80% immediate and 20% from fallout.
How can we know that these examples are real?
Roman Malov links to a Hank Green video with much more mundane examples, like rumble strips on highways. The falling automobile death rate is evidence that car interventions are doing something right, if not proof of a particular example like rumble strips. But how do I know that the Y2K problem was not overblown? If a few systems had had big disasters, I could estimate how much all the other systems had accomplished by avoiding them. But if no one had disasters, I have to consider the possibility that the problem was overblown and the effort expending on the fix wasteful.
You assert that the cost of fighting disease has increasing marginal costs. It is probably true that the cost of physical acts like distributing mosquito nets has increasing marginal costs. But we should test this and find out how fast it grows. Moreover, the sign of the marginal change to deaths/net is really not obvious and has to be measured. It might go down as you run out of people who would use them. Or it might go up, as you achieve herd immunity; or by keeping transmission out of houses, you might cause malaria to evolve to be less debilitating.
PEPFAR is a counterexample to your claim. Its original implementation had poor effectiveness per dose, in line with predictions. In 2006 it switched to generics, expecting to increase effectiveness per dollar by a factor of 10, leaving it still ineffective per dollar. But increasing doses by 10x turned out to be much more than 10x as effective. It is quite mysterious why its effectiveness improved, the best candidate being herd immunity.
The idea of coating the bottom of the pan with tin oxide reminds me of attaching iron to the bottom of a pan to make it work with induction stoves. Microwaves are more flexible in that you could put the tin oxide in an arbitrary shape, such as a wok, while induction requires the ferrous component to be close to the “burner,” but induction stoves seem like a pretty good compromise, covering the advantages you mention.
Does Smith talk about any device with a complicated distribution of receivers? I recently encountered a sandwich press that goes in the microwave. This could be unfolded to lie flat, but I think it was intended to be microwaved folded, heating both sides of the sandwich. What else exists? When I search “microwave accessories” I just find things that don’t absorb microwaves. Is there some other search term? Related products on amazon leads to what seem to be modern microwave skillets, largely flat.
Yes, if you’re going to freeze eggs or embryos, the earlier the better. But what are the tradeoffs between those two choices? Eggs postpone the future choice of sperm, while embryos freeze better. You can put these in the same units: at what age does the yield from freezing embryos at that age match the yield from freezing eggs at age 20?
Most of the time people say “Schelling point” they mean this. Maybe it would be better to call it a Schelling fence, but even that post claims that it is a Schelling point. I suspect that you can reframe it to make it true Schelling point, such as the participants coordinating to approximate the real game by a smaller tractable game, but I’m not sure.
Was Truman the man in the arena? Did he take any actions? My understanding is that he was a scapegoat, both about the bombs and about his presidency in general. The buck stops here for responsibility, but not decisions. He didn’t make the decision to bomb the city of Hiroshima, but specifically wrote that he chose it because there were no civilians. He didn’t weigh the options and decide that it was worth the cost, but rewrote history to pretend that he did. No, he shouldn’t wring his hands about his lying subordinates, but he should do something about them. I hold him responsible for complicity in this charade.