DPiepgrass

Covid vac­cine safety: how cor­rect are these alle­ga­tions?

Let’s make the truth eas­ier to find

Trust and The Small World Fallacy

• DPiepgrass 13 Jun 2021 11:31 UTC

  20 points

  in reply to: Vanilla_cabs’s comment on: Covid vac­cine safety: how cor­rect are these alle­ga­tions?

  Okay, I’ll review the video again and add a list of controversial and interesting bits.

• DPiepgrass 10 Nov 2021 12:45 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: [DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien’s comment on: Com­mon knowl­edge facts about Lev­er­age Re­search 1.0

  The former curriculum director and head-of-workshops for the Center For Applied Rationality would not be welcome or safe at a CFAR event?

  What the **** is going on?

  It sounds to me like mission failure, but I suppose it could also just be eccentric people not knowing how to get along (which isn’t so much different?) 😕

• DPiepgrass 21 Jul 2022 5:29 UTC

  14 points

  16

  in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities

  I do think there’s a noticeable extent to which I was trying to list difficulties more central than those

  Probably people disagree about which things are more central, or as evhub put it:

  Every time anybody writes up any overview of AI safety, they have to make tradeoffs [...] depending on what the author personally believes is most important/​relevant to say

  Now FWIW I thought evhub was overly dismissive of (4) in which you made an important meta-point:

  EY: 4. We can’t just “decide not to build AGI” because GPUs are everywhere, and knowledge of algorithms is constantly being improved and published; 2 years after the leading actor has the capability to destroy the world, 5 other actors will have the capability to destroy the world. The given lethal challenge is to solve within a time limit, driven by the dynamic in which, over time, increasingly weak actors with a smaller and smaller fraction of total computing power, become able to build AGI and destroy the world. Powerful actors all refraining in unison from doing the suicidal thing just delays this time limit—it does not lift it [...]

  evhub: This is just answering a particular bad plan.

  But I would add a criticism of my own, that this “List of Lethalities” somehow just takes it for granted that AGI will try to kill us all without ever specifically arguing that case. Instead you just argue vaguely in that direction, in passing, while making broader/​different points:

  an AGI strongly optimizing on that signal will kill you, because the sensory reward signal was not a ground truth about alignment (???)

  All of these kill you if optimized-over by a sufficiently powerful intelligence, because they imply strategies like ‘kill everyone in the world using nanotech to strike before they know they’re in a battle, and have control of your reward button forever after’. (I guess that makes sense)

  If you perfectly learn and perfectly maximize the referent of rewards assigned by human operators, that kills them. (???)

  Perhaps you didn’t bother because your audience is meant to be people who already believe this? I would at least expect to see it in the intro: “-5. unaligned superintelligences tend to try to kill everyone, here’s why <link>.… −4. all the most obvious proposed solutions to (-5) don’t work, here’s why <link>”.

• DPiepgrass 27 Mar 2024 10:55 UTC

  12 points

  11

  in reply to: Hazard’s comment on: My In­ter­view With Cade Metz on His Re­port­ing About Slate Star Codex

  I agree, except for the last statement. I’ve found that talking to certain people with bad epistemology about epistemic concepts will, instead of teaching them concepts, teach them a rhetorical trick that (soon afterward) they will try to use against you as a “gotcha” (related)… as a result of them having a soldier mindset and knowing you have a different political opinion.

  While I expect most of them won’t ever mimic rationalists well, (i) mimicry per se doesn’t seem important and (ii) I think there are a small fraction of people (tho not Metz) who do end up fostering a “rationalist skin” ― they talk like rationalists, but seem to be in it mostly for gotchas, snipes and sophistry.

• DPiepgrass 2 Jun 2020 20:45 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: roystgnr’s comment on: Book of Mor­mon Discussion

  LessWrong people generally don’t have enough exposure to the LDS church or the Book of Mormon to have a reason to take it seriously, and their worldview is so different that it would be hard for them to even understand why Mormons take it seriously in the first place.
  
  But as a former Mormon, who was born into the church and attended church almost every Sunday for at least 30 years, I’d like to summarize my journey (briefly, as this discussion died off long ago):

  • I read the Book of Mormon three times, taking it seriously each time. I was often confused by parts of the book and other doctrines, but I generally assumed it was something wrong with me instead of the book or the doctrines. (edit: as I matured I was forced to see it as obfuscation by God or, in the most nonsensical cases, evidence that he was evil or did not exist, interpretations I was very reluctant to accept, of course; at most I would ask what the evidence compels me to believe. Remember also that even scientists do not throw out a hypothesis without a better one to replace it: the failed Michelson-Morley experiment did not cause everyone to suddenly decide there was no aether, because there was no Special Relativity to replace it; similarly, the theory of evolution was not a workable alternative to me, partly because I had learned about it only from those who were incompetent to teach me about it, and partly because I was quite sure that I had a soul, which evolutionary theory could not explain. Therefore I often thought about a third alternative, which was the idea that our world was some sort of experiment by ‘researchers’ who were messing with us for some reason.)

  • I prayed many times, hoping God would keep Moroni’s promise but He never did. I have taken morality seriously since I was a child and always tried to do what was right; my only significant failure was my inability to stop masturbating. I tried for 20 years to fight my own sexuality. I supposed (hoped!) that this was the reason why God wouldn’t answer my prayers. It was emotionally very painful that God wouldn’t answer my prayers; in my depression, I would think of worthiness like a high-jump competition in which the bar is invisible, and you can’t measure how high you or other competitors are jumping, and you just have to keep jumping and hoping that someday you will clear the bar. This felt unjust, but I had no way to be sure that God was just. I often met with my bishop, who could not answer my questions and often had to rely on backstop answers like “God hasn’t revealed all the answers to us yet”.

  • Edit: also, on rare occasions I felt a warmth in my chest, or sometimes a feeling of peace, that I hoped was “the Holy Spirit”. However, there was no discernible pattern to it. It seemed to happen at random, and my mind received no information this way. Something that seems important, in hindsight, is that most other LDS people would “bear their testimony” by saying “I know the church is true”, whereas I would say “I believe the church is true”, which was both honest and in line with scripture. I was conscious of this before, but I also avoided thinking about what it meant. For me today, it symbolizes the irony and hypocrisy of cherishing honesty except regarding the most important questions. Many people in the church have trained themselves to talk as if they’re the Brother of Jared after he saw the finger. You know, my brother left the church many years before I did, and the reasons he gave were things like being “tired of feeling guilty”. I felt these were not legitimate reasons to leave. The only reason to leave would be if it wasn’t true―and so I stayed. I believed.

  • I sometimes heard internet atheists talking about silly aspects of religion, but always in a dismissive way that preached to their own choir (I had not discovered Luke M’s commonsenseatheism.com). Their analyses were superficial and not persuasive to me. It seemed to me that I had to take evolution seriously, but I didn’t realize how little I knew about it, and I found an “intelligent design” video persuasive (the video did not talk about God, did not support “creationism”, was designed to sound scientific, and was ostensibly about scientists challenging the traditional “assumptions” of evolutionary theory).

  • I began to worry that if God was real, he sure wasn’t very nice or trustworthy. I found the following quote, which resonated with me: “Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.” If God was just, he wouldn’t condemn me for the legitimate reasons I might have for suspecting he was unreal or unjust, and if he was unjust, I shouldn’t even worship him at all. This quote was crucial in giving me permission to follow the evidence wherever it led.

  • As I began to take seriously the possibility that God wasn’t real, I engaged in a two-pronged strategy where I paid 10% tithing and also gave 10% to charities. If God wasn’t real, tithing was useless and I would have to do good some other way, but if He was real, I needed to show Him I was willing to be his faithful servant. This lasted maybe two years, and then I reduced my tithing to 5% as my faith waned.

  • Somehow, I don’t remember how, I came across the CES Letter in January 2015. After reading it, I understood that the church was false and I left the church immediately. Having done this, I quickly understood some other important things. First, I noticed that I wasn’t willing to go back to church and share the CES letter in any major way. I wasn’t willing to print copies and share them, or give a dramatic talk where the Bishop cuts off my microphone. When I told my best friend about the CES letter, he had no interest in reading it (and remains a Full Tithe Payer to this day). So now I understood survivorship bias—the reason I was surrounded by believers for 30 years, with no one seriously challenging my beliefs (see also evaporative cooling of group beliefs). Second, I noticed something about the evidence that Mormonism was false: the evidence existed only because Mormonism is recent; the church started in the era of the printing press, and there are many surviving records from the 19th century. Suppose for a moment that Christianity is false, and that in the time of Christ there was a lot of clear evidence it was false, just as there was evidence against Mormonism. What would have happened to that evidence? The believers would make many copies of their Holy Book, but the unbelievers ― having no printing press, and caring much less about fighting Christianity than the Christians cared to support it ― would not reliably preserve the evidence that it was false. 30 AD was a very different time, where even the truest of true believers, the disciples of Jesus Christ, seemingly didn’t care to write the Gospels until “forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus”. So, I concluded that Jesus was no more the messiah than other people whose followers called them the messiah.

  • I learned more about LessWrong/​EA/​SSC in the years afterward, became a regular visitor and read Rationality A to Z. I also discovered and signed the Giving What We Can Pledge at 10%, tithing level―an easy decision.

  • Edit: Since then, I’ve felt an amazing clarity of mind that I never enjoyed as a Christian. I used to feel confused and conflicted on a regular basis, understanding neither God nor Evolution properly; at long last I grok both, leaving behind only the mystery of the Hard Problem Of Consciousness. It would’ve been far better to learn about all this earlier in my life! My life has a new foundation now: Mature Consequentialist Utilitarianism built atop two axioms. It was an awful thing to gain the understanding that death is annihilation, but I also learned the Litany of Gendlin: What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it. Nothing actually changed: death was there all along; heaven was a myth. Surprisingly, I’m happier now, and a more effective person too.

  What links here?

  • DPiepgrass's comment on Dark Side Epistemology by Eliezer Yudkowsky (15 Jun 2020 15:47 UTC; 1 point)

• DPiepgrass 17 Jun 2021 0:26 UTC

  11 points

  on: Covid vac­cine safety: how cor­rect are these alle­ga­tions?

  So, I decided to head on over to OpenVAERS, do some searches and look at some reports. Here are the number of results for a few queries for deaths in 2021:

  5997 results in 2021 (all vaccines)
  5869 results in 2021 with Vax Name “covid19”

  3607 results in 2021 for 65+ (all vaccines)
  3543 results in 2021 for 65+ with Vax Name “covid19”
  1673 results in 2021 for 65+ with Vax Name “moderna”
  1691 results in 2021 for 65+ with Vax Name “pfizer”
  165 results in 2021 for 65+ with Vax Name “janssen” (Johnson & Johnson)
  1061 results in 2021 for <65 (all vaccines)

  1023 results in 2021 for <65 with Vax Name “covid19”
  406 results in 2021 for <65 with Vax Name “pfizer”
  458 results in 2021 for <65 with Vax Name “moderna”

  214 results in 2021 for <45 with Vax Name “covid19”
  101 results in 2021 for <35 with Vax Name “covid19″
  37 results in 2021 for <25 with Vax Name “covid19”

  Edit: for comparison, the average annual death rate in the United States in 2018 and 2019 was 719 per 100,000 or 0.719%. Since the population is about 328 million, the expected number of deaths in a normal year is about 2,358,000, and in a typical week, 45,228. Now, 51.56% of the population has received at least one vaccine shot as of June 10 (one week ago). Therefore, if it were the case that someone filed a VAERS report for every death that was not caused by the vaccine but happened within one week of vaccine administration, we would expect to see much more than 5869 death reports, perhaps 23,300 (or higher, because some people have received multiple vaccine shots and because older people are more likely to have been vaccinated). This is relevant because I read that “FDA requires healthcare providers to report any death after COVID-19 vaccination to VAERS”, which explains why we see e.g. two deaths by gunshot wound in my roundup below.

  Since there are only 37 deaths nationwide for age 24 and under, I decided to summarize all of them. Because I could. At least in this category we can rule out age-related illness. I will put the actual summaries of these reports in a separate message in the hope that LessWrong’s display algorithm will be more likely to “collapse” that information.

  I have divided these deaths into mutually exclusive prioritized categories. This means that if a death was in both categories B and D, I only listed it under category B which is listed first.

  • Suicides: 4 (though in one case the person was also ill)

  • Other reports with indications that the death is probably not vaccine-related: 2

  • Death reports more than 14 days after vaccine: 4

  • No information about time between vaccine and death: 1

  • Death within 14 days, but serious pre-existing illness: 8

  • Death within 14 days, seemingly no serious pre-existing illness: 2

  • Death within 14 days, level of pre-existing illness unclear: 16

  Most of the “within 14 day” reports were also within 7 days.

  An interesting indicator would be how many people are getting each vaccine. If the numbers of deaths for each vaccine is exactly proportional to the number of people receiving each vaccine, it would suggest that the vaccines are all equally safe, and if so, the most probable safety level is “very safe”. (wrinkle: if e.g. J&J is a ‘rising star’, the death report curve is likely to lag behind the vaccination rate curve.) But where do I find that data?

  What links here?

  • DPiepgrass's comment on Covid vac­cine safety: how cor­rect are these alle­ga­tions? by DPiepgrass (19 Jul 2021 20:41 UTC; 3 points)

• DPiepgrass 20 Mar 2023 19:11 UTC

  10 points

  4

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Let’s make the truth eas­ier to find

  Most important matters have a large political component. If it’s not political, it’s probably either not important or highly neglected (and as soon as it’s not neglected, it probably gets politicized). Moreover, if I would classify a document as reliable in a non-political context, that same document, written by the same people, suddenly becomes harder to evaluate if it was produced in a politicized context. For instance, consider this is a presentation by a virologist. Ordinarily I would consider a video to be quite reliable if it’s an expert making a seemingly strong case to other experts, but it was produced in a politicized environment and that makes it harder to be sure I can trust it. Maybe, say, the presenter is annoyed about non-experts flooding in to criticize him or his field, so he’s feeling more defensive and wants to prove them wrong. (On the other hand, increased scrutiny can improve the quality of scientific work. It’s hard to be sure. Also, the video had about 250 views when I saw it and 576 views a year later—it was meant for an expert audience, directed to an expert audience, and never went anywhere close to viral, so he may be less guarded in this context than when he is talking to a journalist or something.)

  My goal here is not to solve the problem of “making science work better” or “keeping trivia databases honest”. I want to make the truth easier to find in a political environment that has immense groups of people who are arriving at false or true beliefs via questionable reasoning and cherry-picked evidence, and where expertise is censored by glut. This tends to be the kind of environment where the importance and difficulty (for non-experts) of getting the right answer both go up at once. Where once a Google search would have taken you to some obscure blogs and papers by experts discussing the evidence evenhandedly (albeit in frustratingly obscurantist language), politicization causes the same search to give you page after page of mainstream media and bland explanations which gravitate to some narrative or other and which rarely provide strong clues of reliability.

  I would describe my personal truthseeking as frustrating. It’s hard to tell what’s true on a variety of important matters, and even the ones that seemed easy often aren’t so easy when you dive into it. Examples:

  • I mentioned before my frustration trying to learn about radiation risks.

  • I’ve followed the Ukraine invasion closely since it started. It’s been extremely hard to find good information, to the point where I use quantity as a substitute for quality because I don’t know a better way. This is wastefully time-consuming and if I ever manage to reach a firm conclusion about a subtopic of the war, I have nowhere to publish my findings that any significant number of people would read (I often publish very short summaries or links to what I think is good information on Twitter, knowing that publishing in more detail would be pointless given my lack of audience; I also sometimes comment on Metaculus about war-related topics, but only when my judgement pertains specifically to a forecast that Metaculus happens to ask about.) The general problem I have in this area is a combination of (1) almost nobody citing their sources, (2) the sources themselves often being remarkably barren, e.g. the world-famous Oryx loss data [1, 2] gives nowhere near enough information to tell whether an asserted Russian loss is actually a Russian rather than Ukrainian loss, (3) Russia and Ukraine both have strong information operations that create constant noise, (4) I find pro-Putin sources annoying because of their bloodthirstiness, ultranationalism and authoritarianism, so while some of them give good evidence, I am less likely to discover them, follow them and see that evidence.

  • It appears there’s a “97% consensus on global warming”, but when you delve deep into it, it’s not as clear-cut. Sorry to toot my own horn, but I haven’t seen any analysis of the consensus numbers as detailed and evenhanded as the one I wrote at that link (though I have a bias toward the consensus position). That’s probably not because no one else has done such an analysis, but because an analysis like that (written by a rando and not quite affirming either of the popular narratives) tends not to surface in Google searches. Plus, my analysis is not updated as new evidence comes in, because I’m no longer following the topic.

  • I saw a rather persuasive full-length YouTube ‘documentary’ with holocaust-skepticism. I looked for counterarguments, but those were relatively hard to find among the many pages saying something like “they only believe that because they are hateful and antisemitic” (the video didn’t display any hint of hate or antisemitism that I could see). When I did find the counterarguments, they were interlaced with strong ad-hominim attacks against the people making the arguments, which struck me as unnecessarily inflammatory rather than persuasive.

  • I was LDS for 27 years before discovering that my religion was false, despite always being open to that possibility. For starters, I didn’t realize the extent to which I lived in a bubble or to which I and (especially) other members had poor epistemology. But even outside the bubble it just wasn’t very likely that I would stumble upon someone who would point me to the evidence that it was false.

  is it only the other people who are not good at collecting and organizing evidence?

  No, I don’t think I’m especially good at it, and I often wonder if certain other smart people have a better system. I wish I had better tooling and I want this tool for myself as much as anyone else.

  Not a good sign

  in what way? Are you suggesting that if I built this web site, it would not in fact use algorithms designed in good faith with epistemological principles meant to elevate ideas that are more likely to be true but, rather, it would look for terms like “global warming” and somehow tip the scales toward “humans cause it”?

  connotation-heavy language

  Please be specific.

• DPiepgrass 21 Feb 2023 2:21 UTC

  7 points

  2

  on: On In­ves­ti­gat­ing Con­spir­acy Theories

  the goal is to have fewer people believe things in the category ‘conspiracy theory.’

  Depends how we define the term — a “conspiracy theory” is more than just a hypothesis that a conspiracy took place. Conspiracy theories tend to come with a bundle of suspicious behaviors.

  Consider: as soon as three of four Nord Stream pipelines ruptured, I figured that Putin ordered it. This is an even more “conspiratorial” thought than I usually have, mainly because, before it happened, I thought Putin was bluffing by shutting down Nord Stream 1 and that he would (1) restore the gas within a month or two and (2) finally back down from the whole “Special Military Operation” thing. So I thought Putin would do X one week and decided that he had done opposite-of-X the next week, and that’s suspicious—just how a conspiracy theorist might respond to undeniable facts! Was I doing something epistemically wrong? I think it helped that I had contemplated whether Putin would double down and do a “partial mobilization” literally a few minutes before I heard the news that he had done exactly that. I had given a 40% chance to that event, so when it happened, I felt like my understanding wasn’t too far off base. And, once Putin had made another belligerent, foolish and rash decision in 2022, it made sense that he might do a third thing that was belligerent, foolish and rash; blowing up pipelines certainly fits the bill. Plus, I was only like 90% sure Putin did it (the most well-known proponents of conspiracy theorists usually seem even more certain).

  When I finally posted my “conspiracy theory” on Slashdot, it was well-received, even though I was mistaken in my mind about the Freeport explosion (it only reduced U.S. export capacity by 16%; I expected more). I then honed the argument a bit for the ACX version. I think most people who read it didn’t pick up on it being a “conspiracy theory”. So… what’s different about what I posted versus what people recognize as a “conspiracy theory”?

  • I didn’t express certainty

  • I just admitted a mistake about Freeport. Conspiracy theorists rarely weaken their theory based on new evidence. Also note that I found the 16% figure by actively seeking it out, and I updated my thinking based on it, though it didn’t shift the probability by a lot. (I would’ve edited my post, but Slashdot doesn’t support editing.)

  • I didn’t “sound nuts” (conspiracy theorists often lack self-awareness about how they sound)

  • It didn’t appear to be in the “conspiracy theory cluster”. Conspiracy theorists usually believe lots of odd things. Their warped world model usually bleeds into the conspiracy theory somehow, making it “look like” a conspiracy theory.

  My comment appears in response to award-winning^[1] journalist Seymour Hersh’s piece. Hersh has a single anonymous source saying that Joe Biden blew up Nord Stream, even though this would harm the economic interests of U.S. allies. He shows no signs of having vetted his information, but he solicits official opinions and is told “this is false and complete fiction”. After that, he treats his source’s claims as undisputed facts — so undisputed that claims from the anonymous source are simply stated as raw statements of truth, e.g. he says “The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded” rather than “The source went on to say that the plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded”. Later, OSINT investigator Oliver Alexander pokes holes in the story, and then finds evidence that NS2 ruptured accidentally (which explains why only one of the two NS2 lines was affected) while NS1 was blown up with help from the Minerva Julie, owned by a Russia-linked company. He also notes that the explosives destroyed low points in the pipelines that would minimize corrosion damage to the rest of the lines. This information doesn’t affect Hersh’s opinions, and his responses are a little strange [1][2][3]. Finally, Oliver points out that the NS1 damage looks different from the NS2 damage.

  If you see a theory whose proponents have high certainty, refuse to acknowledge data that doesn’t fit the theory (OR: enlarge the conspiracy to “explain” the new data by assuming it was falsified), speak in the “conspiracy theory genre”, and sound unhinged, you see a “conspiracy theory”^[2]. If it’s just a hypothesis that a conspiracy happened, then no.

  So, as long as people are looking for the right signs of a “conspiracy theory”, we should want fewer people to believe things in that category. So in that vein, it’s worth discussing which signs are more or less important. What other signs can we look for?

  1. ^

     He won a Pulitzer Prize 53 years ago

  2. ^

     Hersh arguably ticks all these boxes, but especially the first two which are the most important. Hersh ignores the satellite data, and assumes the AIS ship location data is falsified (on both the U.S. military ship(s) and the Russia-linked ship?)

• DPiepgrass 26 Sep 2021 19:12 UTC

  7 points

  on: The First Sam­ple Gives the Most Information

  I’ve noticed that misinformative articles are usually wrong from the get-go: fact checking the very first claim in an article is highly predictive of how the rest of the piece will turn out (which is really interesting; I suppose it indicates that most such articles are preaching to a choir, so they don’t worry about roping people in carefully and trying not to trip BS detectors). Good-faith articles often contain errors, but rarely at the very start.

• DPiepgrass 23 Jul 2021 15:00 UTC

  7 points

  on: In­ten­tion­ally Mak­ing Close Friends

  Before seeing this I was just thinking about why I didn’t have any close friends of the sort I wanted, and I figured the reason is that I need someone who is mostly like me, and such people are extraordinarily rare — one in a million, I guessed. No typical mind fallacy for me! I know I’m different, but I don’t know what to do with this information: the differences in other people are mysterious and so non-actionable.

  Maybe I’m only 1-in-10,000 or so, but regardless, I can’t figure out how to find the others. I already frequent sites filled with vaguely similar people (LW, EA forums, ACX) but by design, these sites don’t bring the closeness and intimacy I want. Plus, I live in Calgary — I know the Bay Area and NY will have more me-like people, but I failed last time I tried to get a job in the Bay.

  Anyway, I may as well put down what I’m looking for:

  • Close friendship, preferably sharing a house

  • Rationalist-appeciating 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 problems. (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)

  • 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

• DPiepgrass 16 Apr 2019 19:16 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: User GPT2 is Banned

  Maybe by next year they’ll have an adversarial anti-GPT AI trained to distinguish GPT2 (GPT3? GPT4?) comments from humans. Then GPT can create 50 replies to every human comment, and of those, the other AI will decide which of the replies sounds the *least* like GPT and post that one.

  April Fool’s day: the funniest step on the path to weaponized AI.

• DPiepgrass 2 Nov 2022 19:40 UTC

  6 points

  1

  on: All AGI Safety ques­tions wel­come (es­pe­cially ba­sic ones) [~monthly thread]

  Why wouldn’t a tool/​oracle AGI be safe?

  Edit: the question I should have asked was “Why would a tool/​oracle AGI be a catastrophic risk to mankind?” because obviously people could use an oracle in a dangerous way (and if the oracle is a superintelligence, a human could use it to create a catastrophe, e.g. by asking “how can a biological weapon be built that spreads quickly and undetectably and will kill all women?” and “how can I make this weapon at home while minimizing costs?”)

• DPiepgrass 14 Mar 2022 20:05 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: paulfchristiano’s comment on: Yud­kowsky and Chris­ti­ano dis­cuss “Take­off Speeds”

  I suspect that indeed EY’s model has a limited ability to make near-term predictions, so that yes, the situation is asymmetrical. But I suspect his view is similar to my view, so I don’t think EY is wrong. But I am confused about why EY (i) hasn’t replied himself and (ii) in general, doesn’t communicate more clearly on this topic.

• DPiepgrass 31 Oct 2021 18:21 UTC

  6 points

  on: Where do you live?

  As a Canadian I can testify that Canada certainly seems to be welcoming to all skilled professionals, but from personal experience, their system for issuing temporary/​visitor visas stinks: they rejected my wife’s application to leave her son behind in the Philippines and visit me in Canada because she failed to “prove” that she would leave at the end of her visit. The thing is, it’s impossible to prove! A return flight is not considered evidence, I can’t buy a bond to promise she will leave, and leaving a child behind is considered evidence but, in my case, was insufficient. Notably, there is nothing on any government web site hinting at how hard it is to visit Canada, or how arbitrary and opaque the decisions are.

  As a preliminary check, I filled out a questionnaire and verified that a 35-year-old person with good English skill (7.5/​9 scores on IELTS), 2 years of college, 2 years experience in a skilled profession, married, one child, no job offer in Canada, but $30,000 CAD to bring to Canada, is eligible to apply for Express Entry if the wife scored likewise on the English test (oddly there is no provision for native English speakers). But this is just the very beginning; the Express Entry program doesn’t seem particularly “express” (or fast or cheap). You might be able to apply, but do you have enough “points” to actually immigrate? After a brief review I couldn’t figure out how the point system actually correlates to getting a “invitation to apply”. The most recent minimum number of points was 744 out of 1200, but I can’t find anyone saying whether (1) you’re guaranteed to get an “invitation to apply” if you pass the threshold, or (2) there is some kind of probabilistic formula for the “draw” system based on the points (as this page seems to imply). If you do get an “invitation to apply” I would guess you have some kind of temporary “right” to permanent residence if you immediately do the copious paperwork and pay the $1,325 application fee, but I don’t see anyone spelling out the probability of successful immigration conditional upon having an “invitation to apply”.

• DPiepgrass 27 Jun 2021 1:59 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: dachamian’s comment on: Covid vac­cine safety: how cor­rect are these alle­ga­tions?

  I may not have time to read through all of that, but thanks for the links. I quickly learned some new things by following a few links there + googling around.

  Most notably, some key evidence presented by Steve K that took center stage in the video, both evidence of the dangers of “the vaccines” and evidence of the effectiveness of ivermectin, comes from groups led by the same person, Theresa Lawrie.

  1. Lawrie apparently founded a web site for ivermectin advocacy (registered March 7, 2021) after presenting evidence on Ivermectin’s efficacy on January 13 (to “13 clinicians” and 7 others)

  2. Lawrie is the director of a group of 4 people calling itself “The Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy” that called for “an immediate halt to the [Covid] vaccination programme” on June 9

  3. Lawrie published the meta-analysis Steve was raving about (with 6 co-authors), which found “Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin” (published June 17 but, obviously, completed earlier)

  Now, is Lawrie just one of those productivity superheroes vying for a Nobel prize? Or is there something suspicious about too much evidence and advocacy coming from the same person?

  What makes me the most suspicious is that

  1. the anti-vaccine document performs no cost/​benefit analysis before concluding that all three vaccines are too dangerous to use.

  2. it includes no analysis of base rates (the number of adverse health events that would normally occur in a large population in the absence of any vaccines).

  3. Edit 1: seriously, what are the chances that all three vaccines are both dangerous and equally so? Has that ever happened in history? I think not. (4 different vaccines are implicitly demonized by the video since it talks about US and UK data, but this document is UK-specific; the UK and US have used 3 vaccine brands each)

  4. Edit 2: I don’t say this enough, but one must also consider the reaction of other experts. Large numbers of other experts think the vaccines are safe (safe enough to deploy widely, anyway) and that ivermectin is an interesting treatment but unproven. When experts in high places thought there was a risk of rare blood clots, they were often willing to halt the use of a vaccine even when doing so would lead to a larger number of overall Covid deaths. And of course, while regulatory agencies were understandably in a hurry, separate phase-3 trials were completed on each vaccine (in multiple countries) and showed adequate safety as usual. So the idea that these same experts and agencies are ignoring a wide variety of side-effects, including death, seems preposterous. The only argument I’ve seen against these numerous other visible experts comes from my father, who claimed the media is hiding information because they are controlled by George Soros, and from this video, which explains it as groupthink & social norms. As if scientists but not conservatives do groupthink & social norms.

  I only skimmed the document, but I don’t see any lip service paid to any of these issues or objections. And these are obvious objections, aren’t they? So why wouldn’t they be considered?

  In the absence of other information, I assume that the lack of care demonstrated in this document is typical for Lawrie.

  Unfortunately, my post ended up doing something I disapprove of: it listens to a handful of outspoken scientists (one in particular, it turns out) while utterly ignoring the majority who disagree. I hoped other LessWrong users would tell me how other scientists/​experts are arguing the other side, but I got less of that than I hoped.

• DPiepgrass 10 Sep 2018 4:27 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Ask Us Any­thing: Sub­mit Ques­tions About What We Think SSC is Wrong About, and Why

  Rationalists have a tendency to sound a little bit like Spock, but in reality we are all human here. I’d say that doing a good job managing relationships with other humans, and learning to be kind, doesn’t just fall within the realm of rationalism—it’s crucial to our success! There are a number of things I love about Scott. To me he seems insightful and even-handed, but most relevant here is that he seems like a nice person. So I was not at all impressed the first time I heard Jordan, when he said:

  “Alright so I just read the worst Slate Star Codex article I’ve ever read (a new low) and I’m now more determined than ever to host an event where I try to convince members of this community that Scott Alexander is a pseudo-intellectual not worth reading.”

  This was not followed by any explanation of what Scott had done wrong, or what a “pseudo-intellectual” is. Though reportedly it was meant to be facetious, I just couldn’t read it that way. If you’re going to criticize Scott, try at least not to make obvious mistakes that Scott himself wouldn’t make, such as sounding like a jerk.

  That said, I am curious what Jordan has to say. For starters, which writers are sufficiently free from mistakes that they are “worth reading”, and what criteria qualify a person as “intellectual”?

  I’m sure Scott has made mistakes. Personally, I make mistakes with shocking regularity. And I do think when Scott is talking about a subject where he has little expertise, the disclaimer at the top about that lack of expertise should not be in small text, and Scott may need more expressions of uncertainty (weasel words).

  But I think there is a tension between correctness and popularity. The thing is, perfection is not only difficult, it’s time consuming. I have been known to review my own articles over a dozen times before posting them (and errors may still slip through). My carefulness in turn leads to a low posting frequency, which probably contributes to my unpopularity. If you want to be popular, you have to put out. Look at The Eliezer—I think his stuff is riddled with defects of various types, but he wrote fast and was popular. His stuff is at least mostly good enough to be worth reading, so I do.

  I wonder if we could develop a process where the community’s best writers (and the occasional newcomer) could write “drafts” which would be posted semi-publicly in a “draft” area and then be edited by members trusted by the author (with expert input, if the subject matter demands expert input), before being reposted “publicly for reals this time”. Though if you ask me, priority one for improvement isn’t SSC, it’s The Sequences.

• DPiepgrass 9 May 2024 23:15 UTC

  5 points

  2

  in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: “How could I have thought that faster?”

  I guess you could try it and see if you reach wrong conclusions, but that only works isn’t so wired up with shortcuts that you cannot (or are much less likely to) discover your mistakes.

  I’ve been puzzling over why EY’s efforts to show the dangers of AGI (most notably this) have been unconvincing enough so that other experts (e.g. Paul Christiano) and, in my experience, typical rationalists have not adopted p(doom) > 90% like EY, or even > 50%. I was unconvinced because he simply didn’t present a chain of reasoning that shows what he’s trying to show. Rational thinking is a lot like math: a single mistake in a chain of reasoning can invalidate the whole conclusion. Failure to generate a complete chain of reasoning is a sign that the thinking isn’t rational. And failure to communicate a complete chain of reasoning, as in this case, should fail to convince people (except if the audience can mentally reconstruct the missing information).

  I read all six “tomes” of Rationality: A-Z and I don’t recall EY ever writing about the importance of having a solid and complete chain (or graph) of reasoning―but here is a post about the value of shortcuts (if you can pardon the strawman; I’m using the word “shortcut” as a shortcut). There’s no denying that shortcuts can have value, but only if it leads to winning, which for most of us including EY includes having true beliefs, which in turn requires an ability to generate solid and complete chains of reasoning. If you used shortcuts to generate it, that’s great insofar as it generates correct results, but mightn’t shortcuts make your reasoning less reliable than it first appears? When it comes to AI safety, EY’s most important cause, I’ve seen a shortcut-laden approach (in his communication, if not his reasoning) and wasn’t convinced, so I’d like to see him take it slower and give us a more rigorous and clear case for AI doom ― one that either clearly justifies a very high near-term catastrophic risk assessment, or admits that it doesn’t.

  I think EY must have a mental system that is far above average, but from afar it seems not good enough.

  On the other hand, I’ve learned a lot about rationality from EY that I didn’t already know, and perhaps many of the ideas he came up with are a product of this exact process of identifying necessary cognitive work and casting off the rest. Notable if true! But in my field I, too, have had various unique ideas that no one else ever presented, and I came about it from a different angle: I’m always looking for the (subjectively) “best” solutions to problems. Early in my career, getting the work done was never enough, I wanted my code to be elegant and beautiful and fast and generalized too. Seems like I’d never accept the first version, I’d always find flaws and change it immediately after, maybe more than once. My approach (which I guess earns the boring label ‘perfectionism’) wasn’t fast, but I think it built up a lot of good intuitions that many other developers just don’t have. Likewise in life in general, I developed nuanced thinking and rationalist-like intuitions without ever hearing about rationalism. So I am fairly satisfied with plain-old perfectionism―reaching conclusions faster would’ve been great, but I’m uncertain whether I could’ve or would’ve found a process of doing that such that my conclusions would’ve been as correct. (I also recommend always thinking a lot, but maybe that goes without saying around here)

  I’m reminded of a great video about two ways of thinking about math problems: a slick way that finds a generalized solution, and a more meandering, exploratory way way that looks at many specific cases and examples. The slick solutions tend to get way more attention, but slower processes are way more common when no one is looking, and famous early mathematicians haven’t shied away from long and even tedious work. I feel like EY’s saying “make it slick and fast!” and to be fair, I probably should’ve worked harder at developing Slick Thinking, but my slow non-slick methods also worked pretty well.