Worried that typical commenters at LW care way less than I expected about good epistemic practice. Hoping I’m wrong.
Software developer and EA with interests including programming language design, international auxiliary languages, rationalism, climate science and the psychology of its denial.
Looking for someone similar to myself to be my new best friend:
❖ Close friendship, preferably sharing a house ❖ Rationalist-appreciating epistemology; a love of accuracy and precision to the extent it is useful or important (but not excessively pedantic) ❖ Geeky, curious, and interested in improving the world ❖ Liberal/humanist values, such as a dislike of extreme inequality based on minor or irrelevant differences in starting points, and a like for ideas that may lead to solving such inequality. (OTOH, minor inequalities are certainly necessary and acceptable, and a high floor is clearly better than a low ceiling: an “equality” in which all are impoverished would be very bad) ❖ A love of freedom ❖ Utilitarian/consequentialist-leaning; preferably negative utilitarian ❖ High openness to experience: tolerance of ambiguity, low dogmatism, unconventionality, and again, intellectual curiosity ❖ I’m a nudist and would like someone who can participate at least sometimes ❖ Agnostic, atheist, or at least feeling doubts
Yeesh. No wonder Bret wasn’t impressed—I’ve heard the first 45 minutes and they still haven’t talked about any of the misinformation in Bret’s podcast. Will they eventually get around to talking about it? Who knows, I can’t be bothered to sit through the whole thing. At least at the 40 minute mark they implicitly discussed base rates in VAERS, which seems to be a totally invisible concept to anti-vaxxers.
But at the same time, they’re saying “in the clinical trial no one died” and then talk about the “12 thousand VAERS deaths” without discussing the fact that anti-vaxxers dispute these basic facts. For example I see Kirsch saying, in a “Pfizer 6 month trial” that there were 21 deaths in the vaccine group vs. 17 in placebo (no doubt true but irrelevant); Kirsch also claims there is an enormous underreporting factor (42? I forget) for deaths post vaccination in VAERS (ridiculous, but he has an excuse for making the claim). At 47:20 there’s finally a (forceful but weak) rebuttal of something Bret said.
So the podcast is engaging with anti-vax arguments a little, but the Dark Horse podcast I summarized here is 3 hours long and I can be pretty sure, without hearing the rest, that Sam hasn’t addressed most of the claims made there, let alone everywhere else.