gjm

Karma: 26,145

Hi. I’m Gareth McCaughan. I’ve been a consistent reader and occasional commenter since the Overcoming Bias days. My LW username is “gjm” (not “Gjm” despite the wiki software’s preference for that capitalization). Elsewehere I generally go by one of “g”, “gjm”, or “gjm11”. The URL listed here is for my website and blog, neither of which has been substantially updated in about the last four years. I live near Cambridge (UK) and work for a small technology company in Cambridge. My business cards say “mathematician” but in practice my work is a mixture of simulation, data analysis, algorithm design, software development, problem-solving, and whatever random engineering no one else is doing. I am married and have a daughter born in mid-2006. The best way to contact me is by email: firstname dot lastname at pobox dot com. I am happy to be emailed out of the blue by interesting people. If you are an LW regular you are probably an interesting person in the relevant sense even if you think you aren’t.

If you’re wondering why some of my old posts and comments are at surprisingly negative scores, it’s because for some time I was the favourite target of old-LW’s resident neoreactionary troll, sockpuppeteer and mass-downvoter.

gjm 24 Jul 2021 22:37 UTC
8 points
in reply to: spacecadet’s comment on: Delta variant: we should probably be re-masking
Note that the scary big figure there is for people who were hospitalized and needed ventilation. The figures for “just getting COVID-19” are much smaller.
- Hospital, ventilator: 0.47 SD (7 IQ points)
- Hospital, no ventilator: 0.26 SD (4 IQ points)
- Stayed at home, needed medical assistance for breathing difficulties: 0.13 SD (2 IQ points)
- Stayed at home, breathing difficulties, no medical assistance: 0.07 SD (1 IQ point)
- Stayed at home, ill, no breathing difficulties: 0.04 SD (0.5 IQ points)
I find it slightly suspicious how close each figure is to being half its predecessor :-).
I would absolutely not want to lose an IQ point, but I am quite certain that my effective IQ varies by much larger figures depending on how I’ve slept, how stressed I am, ambient temperature, time of day, etc. And while the authors of the study do seem to have taken some trouble to try to disentangle the effects they’re looking for from things like pre-existing conditions or ongoing COVID-19 symptoms, these effects seem small enough that I wouldn’t be super-confident of any such study’s ability to disentangle those things adequately.
To be clear, I’m not claiming that the effects aren’t real. (Especially the dramatic ones for people who had to be hospitalized.) But this study doesn’t make me very confident that mild cases of COVID-19 are likely to do much harm to the brain.

gjm 23 Jul 2021 10:12 UTC
4 points
in reply to: aphyer’s comment on: Covid 7/22: Error Correction
As Phil says, we already have defamation laws that draw similar distinctions. For instance, in many jurisdictions a statement can’t be defamatory if the person making it made it in good faith and reasonably believed it to be true.
In those cases it’s a kinda-randomly-chosen jury, guided by a court proceeding with lawyers on both sides and a judge in charge, that has to make the call. We as a society seem to have decided that that gives fair enough results. Maybe it would work much less well for an offence of spreading malicious lies (because maybe it would be more tempting for governments to put pressure on the courts, or maybe it would more often happen that the jurors’ political prejudices got in the way of making a reasonable decision) but it’s at least plausible that it would be net beneficial anyway.

gjm 22 Jul 2021 11:17 UTC
2 points
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: My Current Take on Counterfactuals
I appreciate that it’s a model, but it seems—perhaps wrongly, since as already mentioned I am an ignorant doofus—as if at least some of what you’re doing with the model depends essentially on the strictly-logic-based nature of the agent. (E.g., the Troll Bridge problem as stated here seems that way, down to applying Löb’s theorem to the agent as formal system.)
Formal logic is very brittle; ex falso quodlibet, and all that; it (ignorantly and doofusily) looks to me as if you might be looking at a certain class of models and then finding problems (e.g., Troll Bridge) that are only problems because of specific features of the models that couldn’t realistically apply to the real world.
(In terms of the “rocket alignment problem” metaphor: suppose you start thinking about orbital mechanics, come up with exact-conic-section orbits as an interesting class of things to study, and prove some theorem that says that some class of things isn’t achievable for exact-conic-section orbits for a reason that comes down to something like dividing by the sum of squares of all the higher-order terms that are exactly zero for a perfect conic section orbit. That would be an interesting theorem, and it’s not hard to imagine how some less-rigid generalization of it might apply to real trajectories (“if the sum of squares of those coefficients is small then the trajectory is unstable and hard to get right” or something) -- but as it stands it doesn’t really tell you anything about real problems faced by real rockets whose trajectories are not perfect conic sections. And logic is generally much more brittle than orbital mechanics, chaos theory notwithstanding; there isn’t generally anything that corresponds to the sum of squares of coefficients being small; a proof that contains only a few small errors is not a proof at all.)
But, hmm, you reckon one could make a viable proof-based agent that has a consistent set of axioms describing a potentially-inconsistent set of probabilities. That’s an intriguing idea but I’m having trouble seeing how it would work. E.g., suppose I’m searching for proofs that my expected utility if I do X is at least Y units; that expectation obviously involves a whole lot of probabilities, and my actual probability assignments are inconsistent in various ways. How do I prove anything about my expected utilities if the probabilities involved might be inconsistent?
This is all a bit off topic on this particular post; it’s not especially about your account of decision-theoretic counterfactuals as such, but about the whole project of understanding decision theory in terms of agents whose decision processes involve trying to prove things about their own behaviour.

gjm 22 Jul 2021 8:41 UTC
3 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Is there a reasonable reading according to which Baric, Shi et al 2015 isn’t gain-of-function research?
I agree that trying to keep politics out of it as far as possible was a wise move.

gjm 21 Jul 2021 20:50 UTC
4 points
on: Is there a reasonable reading according to which Baric, Shi et al 2015 isn’t gain-of-function research?
Some relevant things in the paper:
- Previous expectations had been (at least, according to the paper; I haven’t checked that they aren’t lying) that viruses like the one they made should not be able to infect humans. They found evidence that it might be possible after all, so maybe it ended up being research that produced gain of function, but I think “gain of function research” is usually taken to mean research intended or at least expected to produce gain of function.
- Their modified virus (SHC014-MA15), if I’m understanding right, was a sort of combination of an existing SARS virus adapted to be more suitable for infecting mice rather than humans (SARS-MA15) and an existing bat coronavirus (SHC014-CoV). The modified virus was less harmful to mice than the pre-existing SARS-MA15, not more.
- They explicitly discuss GoF concerns and say (I paraphrase) “what we did isn’t technically GoF research, but in view of what we found it seems like we should consider not doing this stuff in future”.
It’s certainly “GoF-adjacent” research at least, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that (1) it’s not exactly GoF research and (2) it doesn’t fall into the categories forbidden by US policy from 2014 to 2017. (The moratorium was on research “that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route”. This research did modify a SARS virus, namely SARS-MA15, but in a way that wasn’t expected to make it more harmful or more transmissible in mammals via the respiratory route; it in fact seems to have made the virus less harmful to the animals it’s best suited to, namely mice, but it turned out that it did make it more able to infect humans. I guess a lot turns on what counts as “reasonably anticipated”.)
[I am neither a biologist nor a lawyer.]

gjm 21 Jul 2021 18:33 UTC
2 points
on: Is there a reasonable reading according to which Baric, Shi et al 2015 isn’t gain-of-function research?
Do we know on what basis the NIH classified this as not GoF research? It might be worth separating out “the NIH uses unexpected/weird/just-plain-wrong criteria” from “the NIH’s criteria are not being applied correctly in this case”.

gjm 17 Jul 2021 18:29 UTC
LW: 2 AF: 1
AF
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: My Current Take on Counterfactuals
OK, I get it. (Or at least I think I do.) And, duh, indeed it turns out (as you were too polite to say in so many words) that I was distinctly confused.
So: Using ordinary conditionals in planning your actions commits you to reasoning like “If (here in the actual world it turns out that) I choose to smoke this cigarette, then that makes it more likely that I have the weird genetic anomaly that causes both desire-to-smoke and lung cancer, so I’m more likely to die prematurely and horribly of lung cancer, so I shouldn’t smoke it”, which makes wrong decisions. So you want to use some sort of conditional that doesn’t work that way and rather says something more like “suppose everything about the world up to now is exactly as it is in the actual world, but magically-but-without-the-existence-of-magic-having-consequences I decide to do X; what then?”. And this is what you’re calling decision-theoretic counterfactuals, and the question is exactly what they should be; EDT says no, just use ordinary conditionals, CDT says pretty much what I just said, etc. The “smoking lesion” shows that EDT can give implausible results; “Death in Damascus” shows that CDT can give implausible results; etc.
All of which I really should have remembered, since it’s all stuff I have known in the past, but I am a doofus. My apologies.
(But my error wasn’t being too mired in EDT, or at least I don’t think it was; I think EDT is wrong. My error was having the term “counterfactual” too strongly tied in my head to what you call linguistic counterfactuals. Plus not thinking clearly about any of the actual decision theory.)
It still feels to me as if your proof-based agents are unrealistically narrow. Sure, they can incorporate whatever beliefs they have about the real world as axioms for their proofs—but only if those axioms end up being consistent, which means having perfectly consistent beliefs. The beliefs may of course be probabilistic, but then that means that all those beliefs have to have perfectly consistent probabilities assigned to them. Do you really think it’s plausible that an agent capable of doing real things in the real world can have perfectly consistent beliefs in this fashion? (I am pretty sure, for instance, that no human being has perfectly consistent beliefs; if any of us tried to do what your proof-based agents are doing, we would arrive at a contradiction—or fail to do so only because we weren’t trying hard enough.) I think “agents that use logic at all on the basis of beliefs about the world that are perfectly internally consistent” is a much narrower class than “agents that use logic at all”.
(That probably sounds like a criticism, but once again I am extremely aware that it may be that this feels implausible to me only because I am lacking important context, or confused about important things. After all, that was the case last time around. So my question is more “help me resolve my confusion” than “let me point out to you how the stuff you’ve been studying for ages is wrongheaded”, and I appreciate that you may have other more valuable things to do with your time than help to resolve my confusion :-).)

gjm 16 Jul 2021 22:03 UTC
LW: 11 AF: 7
AF
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: My Current Take on Counterfactuals
I agree that much of what’s problematic about the example I gave is that the “inner” counterfactuals are themselves unclear. I was thinking that this makes the nested counterfactual harder to make sense of (exactly because it’s unclear what connection there might be between them) but on reflection I think you’re right that this isn’t really about counterfactual nesting and that if we picked other poorly-defined (non-counterfactual) propositions we’d get a similar effect: “If it were morally wrong to eat shellfish, would humans Really Truly Have Free Will?” or whatever.
I’d not given any thought before to your distinction between linguistic and decision-theoretic counterfactuals. I’m actually not sure I understand the distinction. It’s obvious how ordinary conditionals are important for planning and acting (you design a bridge so that it won’t fall down if someone drives a heavy lorry across it; you don’t cross a bridge because you think the troll underneath will eat you if you cross), but counterfactuals? I mean, obviously you can put them in to a particular problem: you’re crossing a bridge and there’s a troll who’ll blow up the bridge if you would have crossed it if there’d been a warning sign saying “do not cross”, or whatever. But that’s not counterfactuals being useful for decision theory, it’s some agent arbitrarily caring about counterfactuals—and agents can arbitrarily care about anything. (I am not entirely sure I’ve understood the “Troll Bridge” example you’re actually using, but to whatever extent it’s about counterfactuals it seems to be of this “agent arbitrarily caring about counterfactuals” type.) The thing you call “proof-based decision theory” involves trying to prove things of the form “if I do X, I will get at least Y utility” but those look like ordinary conditionals rather than counterfactuals to me too. (And in any case the whole idea of doing what you can rigorously prove from a given set of mathematical axioms gives you the most guaranteed utility seems bonkers to me anyway as anything other than a toy example, though this is pure prejudice and maybe there are better reasons for it than I can currently imagine: we want agents that can act in the actual world, about which one can generally prove precisely nothing of interest.) Could you give a couple of examples where counterfactuals are relevant to planning and acting without having been artificially inserted?
It may just be that none of this should be expected to make sense to someone not already immersed in the particular proof-based-decision-theory framework I think you’re working in, and that what I need in order to appreciate where you’re coming from is to spend a few hours (days? weeks?) getting familiar with that. At any rate, right now “passing Troll Bridge” looks to me like a problem applicable only to a very specific kind of decision-making agent, one I don’t see any particular reason to think has any prospect of ever being relevant to decision-making in the actual world—but I am extremely aware that this may be purely a reflection of my own ignorance.

gjm 13 Jul 2021 15:11 UTC
16 points
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: What would it look like if it looked like AGI was very near?
I assume it’s a reference to a famous quip by Wittgenstein. Supposedly someone said to him something along the lines of “Well, of course everyone thought the sun went around the earth because it looks as if the sun goes around the earth”, and he replied “So, what would it have looked like if it had looked like the earth was rotating?”.
The point being that when we say “it looks as if X”, meaning implicitly ”… and not Y”, it’s not necessarily because it actually looks any less like Y (and if Y is true, then presumably it does in fact look as it would have looked if Y); it could just be that our ability to understand what Y would look like, or to think of Y as a possibility at all, is insufficient.
Presumably Bjartur considers that AGI may well in fact be very near. “What would it look like if AGI was near?” suggests (even if it doesn’t quite imply) that AGI isn’t in fact near and we’re asking how the world would look different if it were near. If in fact AGI may be near in the real world, we don’t want to be looking just for differences. So, instead, Bjartur suggests looking back from a future in which it turns out that AGI was near all along, and asking what in that situation we expect things to look like around now.

gjm 12 Jul 2021 11:07 UTC
18 points
on: The inescapability of knowledge
It seems worth distinguishing two propositions:
1. “Knowledge is the existence of a correspondence between map and territory; the nature of this correspondence has no bearing on whether it constitutes knowledge.”
2. “Knowledge is the existence of a certain kind of correspondence between map and territory; the nature of this correspondence is important, and determines whether it constitutes knowledge, and how much, and what of.”
Your observation that there are way too many possible correspondences suffices to refute #1. I am not convinced that you’ve offered much reason to reject #2, though of course #2 is of little use without some clarity as to what correspondences constitute knowledge and why. And I’m pretty sure that when people say things like “knowledge is map-territory correspondence” they mean something much more like #2 than like #1.
You’ve looked at some particular versions of #2 and found that they don’t work perfectly. It may be the case that no one has found a concrete version of #2 that does work; I am not familiar enough with the literature to say. But if you’re claiming that #2 is false (which “it just does not seem tenable that knowledge consists of a correspondence between map and territory” seems to me to imply), that seems to me to go too far.
#1 reminds me of a famous argument of Hilary Putnam’s against computational functionalism (i.e., the theory that being a particular mind amounts to executing a particular sort of computation) -- literally any physical object has a (stupid) mapping onto literally any Turing machine. I don’t think this argument is generally regarded as successful, though here too I’m not sure anyone has an actual concrete proposal for exactly what sort of correspondence between mental states and computations is good enough. In any case, the philosophical literature on this stuff might be relevant even though it isn’t directly addressing your question.
Some thoughts on #2.
- Hitherto, arguably the only instances of “knowledge” as such have been (in) human minds. It is possible that “knowledge” is a useful term when applied specifically to humans (and might in that case be defined in terms of whatever specific mechanisms of map/territory correspondence our brains use) but that asking “does X know Y?” or “is X accumulating knowledge about Y?” is not a well-defined question if we allow X to be a machine intelligence, an alien, an archangel, etc.
  - It might happen that, if dealing with some particular class of thing very unlike human beings, the most effective abstractions in this area don’t include anything that quite corresponds to “knowledge”. (I don’t have in mind a particular way this would come about.)
- It seems to me that the specific objections you’ve raised leave it entirely possible that some definition along the following lines—which is merely a combination of the notions you’ve said knowledge isn’t “just”—could work well:
  - Given
    an agent X
    some part or aspect or possession Y of X
    some part or aspect of the world Z,
  - we say that “X is accumulating knowledge of Z in Y” when the following things are true.
    There is increasing mutual information (or something like mutual information; I’m not sure that mutual information specifically is the exact right notion here) between Y and Z.
    In “most” situations, X’s utility increases as that mutual information does. (That is: in a given situation S that X could be in, for any t let U(t) be the average of X’s utility over possible futures of S in which, shortly afterward, the mutual information is t; then “on the whole” U(t) is an increasing function. “On the whole” means something like “as we allow S to vary, the probability that this is so is close to 1″.)
- To be clear, the above still leaves lots of important details unspecified, and I don’t know how to specify them. (What exactly do we count as an agent? Not all agenty things exactly have utility functions; what do we mean by “X’s utility”? Is it mutual information we want, or conditional entropy, or absolute mutual information, or what? What probability distributions are we using for these things? How do we cash out “on the whole”? What counts as “shortly afterward”? Etc.)
  - But I think these fuzzinesses correspond to genuine fuzziness in the concept of “knowledge”. We don’t have a single perfectly well defined notion of “knowledge”, and I don’t see any reason why we should expect that there is a single One True Notion out there. If any version of the above is workable, then probably many versions are, and probably many match about equally well with our intuitive idea of “knowledge” and provide about equal insight.
  - E.g., one of your counterexamples concerned a computer system that accumulates information (say, images taken by a camera) but doesn’t do anything with that information. Suppose now that the computer system does do something with the images, but it’s something rather simple-minded, and imagine gradually making it more sophisticated and making it use the data in a cleverer way. I suggest that as this happens, we should become more willing to describe the situation as involving “knowledge”, to pretty much the same extent as we become more willing to think of the computer system as an agent with something like utilities that increase as it gathers data. But different people might disagree about whether to say, in a given case, “nah, there’s no actual knowledge there” or not.
- In one of your posts, you say something like “we mustn’t allow ourselves to treat notions like agent or mind as ontologically basic”. I agree, but I think it’s perfectly OK to treat some such notions as prerequisites for a definition of “knowledge”. You don’t want that merely-information-accumulating system to count as accumulating “knowledge”, I think precisely because it isn’t agenty enough, or isn’t conscious enough, or something. But if you demand that for something to count as an account of knowledge it needs to include an account of what it is to be an agent, or what it is to be conscious, then of course you are going to have trouble finding an acceptable account of knowledge; I don’t think this is really a difficulty with the notion of knowledge as such.
- It might turn out that what we want in general is a set of mutually-dependent definitions: we don’t define “agent” and then define “knowledge” in terms of “agent”, nor vice versa, but we say that a notion K of knowledge and a notion A of agency (and a notion … of …, and etc. etc.) are satisfactory if they fit together in the right sort of way. Of course I have no concrete proposal for what the right sort of way is, but it seems worth being aware that this sort of thing might happen. In that case we might be able to derive reasonable notions of knowledge, agency, etc., by starting with crude versions, “substituting them in”, and iterating.

gjm 12 Jul 2021 9:51 UTC
5 points
on: Winston Churchill, futurist and EA
Nitpick: When you say “already they were most excited, not about fusion, but fission”, I think that must be the wrong way around. The short quotation that follows describes (or at least gestures at) two ways of extracting energy from nuclear reactions. The first (hydrogen to helium) is definitely fusion. The second (combining hydrogen’s electrons with its nuclei) … doesn’t sound like it would actually work, but at any rate there’s no possible way that it could be called fission.

gjm 9 Jul 2021 10:02 UTC
LW: 11 AF: 7
AF
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: My Current Take on Counterfactuals
I never found Stalnaker’s thesis at all plausible, not because I’d thought of the ingenious little calculation you give but because it just seems obviously wrong intuitively. But I suppose if you don’t have any presuppositions about what sort of notion an implication is allowed to be, you don’t get to reject it on those grounds. So I wasn’t really entitled to say “Pr(A|B) is not the same thing as Pr(B=>A) for any particular notion of implication”, since I hadn’t thought of that calculation.
Anyway, I have just the same sense of obvious wrongness about this counterfactual version of Stalnaker. I suspect it’s harder to come up with an outright refutation, not least because there isn’t anything like general agreement about what C(A|B) means, whereas there’s something much nearer to that for Pr(A|B).
At least some “nestings” of counterfactuals feel problematic to me. “Suppose it were true that if Bach had lived to be 90 then Mozart would have died at age 10; then if Dirichlet had lived to be 80, would Jacobi have died at 20?” The antecedent doesn’t do much to make clear just what is actually being supposed, and it’s not clear that this is made much better if we say instead “Suppose you believe, with credence 0.9, that if Bach had lived to be 90 then Mozart would have died at age 10; then how strongly do you believe that if Dirichlet had lived to be 80 then Jacobi would have died at 20?”. But I do think that a good analysis of counterfactuals should allow for questions of this form. (But, just as some conditional probabilities are ⁰⁄₀ and some others are small/small and we shouldn’t trust our estimates much, some counterfactual probabilities are undefined or ill-conditioned. Whether or not they are actually literal ratios.)

gjm 7 Jul 2021 12:20 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Olomana’s comment on: Chess and cheap ways to check day to day variance in cognition
One option is to do tactics puzzles instead of playing actual games. I don’t know which is likely to correlate better with other aspects of mental performance.

gjm 5 Jul 2021 20:05 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: You are allowed to edit Wikipedia
Yes, to be clear, I meant relevant to this discussion and specifically to Vanilla_cabs’s complaint that Wikipedia’s policy amounts to a double standard. The policy of using the most widely used terms could produce unfairly inconsistent results, if the populace at large were biased (e.g., differential outrage for things affecting men vs things affecting women, or for things associated with “Western” religions versus things associated with “weird foreign” religions), or if different topics were commonly discussed by different groups of people (e.g., if cutting off foreskins were widely talked about among the populace at large but cutting off clitorises were more commonly a concern of anthropologists) -- but in the present case it’s not clear that even that is true; one could plausibly arrive at the same terminological decisions as Wikipedia while having fairness and consistency as important goals.
(I agree that even if this weren’t so, there wouldn’t be much prospect of changing Wikipedia’s usage.)

gjm 5 Jul 2021 17:59 UTC
6 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: You are allowed to edit Wikipedia
It’s also relevant that “circumcision” is a fairly accurate description of what is done to boys, but not of most of the things that are done to girls; and that many of the things done to girls are more severe in their effects than circumcision. So it’s not at all obvious that calling the thing done to boys “circumcision” and the thing done to girls “mutilation” is wrong; they are not at all the same thing, the word “circumcision” is more appropriate to the former than to the latter, and the word “mutilation” is more appropriate to the latter than to the former.
(To be clear, I am not saying that you’re wrong if you call what is done to boys “mutilation” [EDITED to add: or, more to the point, that Vanilla_cabs is]. Only that using different terminology in the two cases doesn’t need to be a double standard; it suffices to be picky about the meaning of “circumcision” or restrictive about what you call “mutilation” or both.)

gjm 3 Jul 2021 11:50 UTC
4 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Covid 7/1: Don’t Panic
I feel like I should begin by pointing out that the discussion is now entirely about one parenthetical side-remark I made, and that you’ve apparently given up defending all the arguments you made in support of the claim that if SARS-CoV-2 had been thought to be a lab release rather than a zoonosis from early on, it would have changed how we tried to fight it for the better. (I think it’s good that you’ve given up defending them, because I think they’re all completely wrong.)
Anyway. Once again, the point is not that I think no one ever lied about anything related to the lab-leak hypothesis. (That would be really surprising. There is always evidence for anything, whether it’s actually true or actually false, and if you point at a group of people and say “maybe you guys were responsible for killing millions of people and doing trillions of dollars of economic damage” you should expect that some of them, and some other people who don’t want them to look bad, will be less than forthcoming about any evidence supporting your claim. Whether there’s any truth to the claim or not.)
The point is that you accused Zvi of “pretending that it didn’t matter that they lied to us”, and that’s not a reasonable accusation unless (1) Zvi actually believes that “they lied to us” or at the very least (2) it’s so obvious that “they lied to us” that if Zvi doesn’t believe it then it can only be because he’s deceiving himself—where “they lied to us” means something for which it plausibly would matter if “they lied to us”. It’s not at all clear to me that either #1 or #2 is true.
Also: I think you are misunderstanding the structure of Zvi’s argument, because so far as I can see no matter what you take “they lied to us” to mean, and no matter how strong the evidence is that that’s so, Zvi is not in fact claiming that it doesn’t matter at all in any way whether “they lied to us”, he’s claiming only that the main conclusions from “COVID-19 started from a lab leak” and “there’s a 10% chance that COVID-19 started from a lab leak” and “COVID-19 was zoonotic, but lab safety was poor enough that it could have started from a lab leak” are pretty much identical: any of these means that the virus lab wasn’t being nearly careful enough, and any of them means that gain-of-function research is looking like a very poor cost-benefit tradeoff. Whether (say) Anthony Fauci is an honest person whose public statements can be trusted is much less important than those things. (For that matter, I’m pretty sure Zvi is already firmly in the “Anthony Fauci’s public statements cannot be trusted” camp, after what he said about masks early on, so learning that “they lied to us” on this score wouldn’t much change his opinion about that.) So (I claim) he was never making the statement you objected to.
Suppose everything you claim about lab leaks and cover-ups is correct. What follows, and how is it actionable? 0. We conclude that the lab-leak hypothesis is at least credible. (This is indeed important, but this part is already widely credited, and it doesn’t at all depend on your claims about lies and cover-ups. And Zvi already acknowledges this bit; see previous paragraph.) 1. We conclude that Anthony Fauci is not perfectly honest with the public, when he thinks that misleading the public would do more good than harm. We already had good reason to think that, after the business with masks. You might say “so he should lose his job” but (a) I don’t think it’s very common for people in his sort of job to lose it for behaving in a way that suits the establishment and (b) I see no reason to think that anyone else in his position would behave differently. 2. We suspect … something? … about Tedros Adhanom. (Your post about this mentions that Fauci, Farrar et al talked about contacting him, maybe about things related to the lab-leak hypothesis, and then says that the WHO was going to work with social media companies to “counter misinformation”. It seems like you want to suggest that Adhanom was in on the conspiracy to suppress the lab-leak hypothesis and that he put pressure on social media companies to do likewise, but the evidence seems awfully thin.) 3. We conclude that Jeremy Farrar (of whom I had never heard before), like Fauci, is willing to mislead the public for their own good. I can’t think of any way in which I could actually use that information. (Note: I say “for their own good” because I don’t see any obvious way in which Farrar personally would be harmed if the lab leak hypothesis became generally accepted. Fauci’s situation might be a bit different, though the alleged connections seem pretty weak to me.) 4. We conclude that various other individual scientists (Daszak, Andersen) are willing to bend the truth to avoid looking bad. I can’t think of any way in which I could actually use that information. 5. We conclude that sometimes consensus can be engineered. I’m pretty sure we already knew that.
So I’m with Zvi on this: even assuming that all the claims and conjectures and insinuations in that post of yours are correct, the at-all-actionable conclusions from “lab leak and cover-up” and from “no lab leak, no cover-up, but it turns out that research on coronaviruses was being conducted in a way that could have led to a lab leak” are close to identical.
Note that “everyone around me is suddenly more concerned about being within the Overton window” is what being infected oneself by a conspiracy theory feels like from the inside. You could be right, of course. But it’s not obvious to me that “almost everyone else on LW falls into the same epistemic hole, while Christian doesn’t” is more likely than “Christian falls into an epistemic hole, while almost everyone else on LW doesn’t”. (It’s not as obviously less likely as that formulation may make it sound, of course. A widely prevailing narrative backed by the scientific establishment is likely to have an easier time capturing minds around here than a fringe-looking conspiracy-looking theory, conditional on the two having similar amounts of actual truth to them.)

gjm 2 Jul 2021 23:39 UTC
16 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Covid 7/1: Don’t Panic
In nature a virus benefits from the host being mobile [...]
Yes, that’s a reason why maybe lab-engineered viruses might be more lethal than naturally occurring ones. But that’s not what you said. You said that if SARS-CoV-2 originated naturally then we would be right to expect that any mutant versions of it would be less lethal, whereas if it was lab-engineered then we shouldn’t have that expectation. That is what I don’t see any justification for.
In fact, to whatever extent your argument here is right, we should expect lab-engineered viruses to have more reduction in lethality when they mutate, because that would be where the evolutionary pressures for less lethality that you mention would start to come in.
(My understanding—which is entirely second-hand so I am not suggesting anyone should trust it much—is that in fact the idea that mutations tend to make pathogens less lethal over time is mostly false, at least for things like SARS-CoV-2 that usually don’t kill their hosts and almost never kill them really quickly. So I wouldn’t, in fact, expect much difference between natural and lab-engineered viruses either in lethality or in change in lethality over time. Unless of course the lab-engineering was specifically aiming to make them more or less lethal; so far as I know there’s no good reason to believe that that was done in the case of SARS-CoV-2 if it did originate in a lab.)
The argument is rather: We expect this virus to behave similarly to the flu or SARS as far as transmission outdoors is concerned.
I think it was reasonable to expect it to be somewhat like SARS because the virus itself is very like the SARS virus. So far as I can tell, there’s no particular reason why thinking the virus was lab-engineered rather than zoonotic would change that.
Before the first BLM demonstration [...] we expected that the kind of meeting outdoors would produce a significant amount of infections.
My recollection is that (1) that was not universally expected and (2) at least some people argued—I forget whether it was before or after it transpired that there wasn’t a big increase in infections—that the effects of BLM demonstrations might be counterbalanced by other people staying home because they didn’t want to get caught up in demonstrations, rioting, crowds, etc.
I think “airborne transmission is more likely in a world with a lab leak” isn’t at all clear (assuming that it means that lab-engineered viruses are more likely to be able to spread that way), but I do agree that a lab leak is more likely if airborne transmission is possible, which means that Pr(airborne transmission | lab leak) > Pr(airborne transmission), a point that hadn’t occurred to me before you pointed it out. I don’t know enough about the mechanisms of actual lab leaks to have a good idea of how much bigger the probability becomes on conditionalizing on lab leak.
Whether or not it actually was a lab leak is independent from people lying except for Shi and a few other Chinese that actually know for certain
Surely that’s false. E.g., whether there actually was a leak surely isn’t independent of whether Daszak genuinely thought it hugely unlikely that there was a leak. (Because both correlate with how much work WIV was doing with SARS-CoV-2-like viruses, and with how good WIV’s safety practices were.)
But let’s return for a moment to the actual context. Zvi said that the origins of COVID-19 don’t matter much, and you said oh yes they do, because it matters that they lied to us. Your statement is actually responsive to Zvi’s only in so far as what they allegedly lied to us about is the origins of COVID-19 (as opposed to, say, how confident any particular scientist was at any particular point about how likely it is that it originated with a lab leak). Lies about that are absolutely not independent of whether or not it actually was a lab leak.
This sounds like a weird post-truth idea [...]
Obviously I wasn’t saying (and don’t believe) the silly thing you accuse me of saying. I do, however, believe the following two quite different things. (1) It has, in fact, not been conclusively established that “they lied to us” about the origin of COVID-19. (One reason for this, though not the most important, is that it’s entirely unclear who “they” are. Let’s have more precision and less political sloganizing here.) (2) While what’s true doesn’t depend at all on (though it correlates with) what other people around you find credible, what it’s reasonable to state flatly as if it’s common knowledge does depend on that. In the present case, accusing Zvi of “pretending it doesn’t matter that they lied to us” presupposes that Zvi agrees, or at least that he would agree if he were reasonable, that “they lied to us”; I don’t think either of those things is reasonable to presuppose.

gjm 2 Jul 2021 16:39 UTC
23 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Covid 7/1: Don’t Panic
This mostly seems wrong to me.
I don’t remember anyone saying anything like “we should assume this virus can spread as easily outdoors as indoors, because evolution would make sure that a respiratory virus can do that”. (It probably can’t; I’m pretty sure all respiratory viruses spread more readily indoors.)
I can’t think of any reason to think that mutant versions of a naturally-occurring zoonotic virus would be less lethal than mutant versions of an otherwise similar virus produced in a lab.
There is no evolutionary pressure discouraging viruses from producing the degree of heart and brain damage (or any other ill effects) SARS-CoV-2 appears to produce in humans. You only get evolutionary pressure of that sort when the virus starts killing its host before it has a good chance to spread. Deaths from SARS-CoV-2 almost always happen well after the usual period of infectivity.
Further, not all lab-leak scenarios even have SARS-CoV-2 being a lab-engineered virus. Another possibility is that it’s a bat coronavirus that they were studying at the WIV and it got into humans by infecting some of their researchers. In that case, it would be much like any other zoonosis and its having escaped from a lab would tell us nothing useful about it.
It certainly does matter whether we have been lied to about the origins of COVID-19. (Note: Since it has not, in fact, been conclusively established that it did start with a lab leak, you should have written “whether they lied to us” rather than “that they lied to us”, but I do not expect you to agree.) But I think Zvi is right that it matters mostly for political reasons—it’s important to know what sort of lies we are being told—and not because it makes a big difference to how we should (1) try to protect ourselves from COVID-19 or (2) deal with virus research, going forward.

gjm 2 Jul 2021 0:39 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Zvi’s comment on: Covid 7/1: Don’t Panic
I think the great majority of UK vaccinations are AZ.

gjm 2 Jul 2021 0:38 UTC
8 points
in reply to: aa.oswald’s comment on: Covid 7/1: Don’t Panic
To clarify that 50% figure: According to [official figures](https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations) -- see “Vaccination uptake, by report date”—about 63% of the eligible population in the UK has had two vaccine doses, and about 85% have had two. But it’s about 50% of the whole population, including infants and children, and infants and children are not being vaccinated.
So far as I can tell, the UK government’s intention is just to let every schoolchild in the UK get COVID-19. At least, there’s no serious plan to start vaccinating them any time soon, and in the face of rapidly increasing case numbers in schools I’m hearing much more ”… so we have to find a way to let schools send fewer pupils home when cases occur, to keep children in school” than ”… so we have to get stricter about sending pupils home when cases occur, to reduce the spread”.
It’s just as well children seem to be less badly harmed than adults by getting COVID-19. (Though they are certainly not guaranteed no serious harm, and given the enormous numbers of children likely to get it I suspect the absolute number of cases of serious harm will be pretty large.)