Good point!
ROM
Karma: 38
I somewhat agree with this, though it’s separate from the point I was making.
It seems to me (and I could be misinterpreting you) that in your post, you’re suggesting the greater the distance between the cave and the initial site of infection, the less likely natural origin theory is true. I wanted to point out that this is inaccurate.
right, an intermediate host or some other mechanism could have moved the virus a long way before it went exponential.
Exactly. I’m confused why this might make you skeptical when it’s generally accepted as having happened with SARS CoV-1. Could you explain?
If the virus moves around randomly, it should appear somewhere at random in a large radius of the animal reservoir, and it’s unlikely to make it to specifically the lab where it was being studied!
Sure, but this is a separate point. That it turned up in Wuhan beside the WIV is surprising.
That it turned up hundreds of kilometers away from the precipitating reservoir isn’t.
Small nitpick:
Then in late 2019, a novel coronavirus that spreads rapidly through humans, that has a Furin Cleavage Site, appears in… Wuhan… thousands of miles away from the bat caves in Southern China where the closest natural variants live, and only a few miles from Wuhan Institute of Virology
I don’t think it’s thousands of miles away. The caves where RaTG13 (one of Covids closest relatives and the same virus that was sampled by the Wuhan institute of virology) was first discovered are in Mojiang Hani Autonomous County, Yunnan, about 930 miles away (you can check on Google maps).
Separately, the bat populations being far away makes sense in the context of “natural origin” theory, which purports that the virus didn’t jump straight from bats but passed first through an intermediate (pangolin or what have you) before jumping to humans. That the bat population isn’t in Wuhan doesn’t necessarily make it less likely to be natural origin. This might not have been what you implied (though it’s how I read it).
In the case of SARS CoV-1, the first case we know of appeared in Foshan. However, the most likely originating bat population reside in a cave 1,000km away (621 miles)
As I already wrote, the distance from the center of Wuhan to one of the variant I assume you’re referencing (the one collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virologists researchers, RaTG13) is 1,500km (932 miles) away in Yunnan. A difference of 500km (310 miles) doesn’t seem out of the question for roaming animals passing disease between each other.
The site freerangekids has a map depicting an (anecdotal) decrease in childhood roaming over four generations. Not exactly hard data, but gestures at something obviously true.
Slightly adjacent to your post, but felt worth mentioning
I’m disappointed you didn’t engage with Seth’s claim that you’re assuming all the claims made are either collectively true or collectively false.
Is it true that someone with psychosis (assuming your judgement is correct) making an allegation of sexual abuse is more likely to be lying/mistaken than not?
I.e someone with psychosis making a claim like the above is less likely than someone without psychosis to be accurately interpreting reality, but is their claim more likely to be false than not? Your argument leans heavily on her having psychosis. Do people with psychosis make more false allegations of sexual assault that true allegations?
Breiding et al., 2014 estimates that around 19.3% of women in the US have been sexually assaulted. Assuming the rate is similar for people with psychosis, more than 1 in 5 women with psychosis would need to make false allegations for the base assumption to be “person has psychosis therefore their sexual assault claim is more likely false than true”.On reflection this part wasn’t a good point.
Post Meetup Notes:
Total of 8 attendees
2 new
The temporary disappearance of Jack Ma in 2020 when the CCP decided that his company Alibaba had become too powerful is another cautionary tale for Chinese tech CEOs to not challenge the CCP.
I think Jack Ma’s disappearance had as much to do with Alibaba being powerful as it did with a speech he gave critiquing the CCP’s regulatory policy.
There are other equally sized / influential companies in China (or even bigger ones such as Tencent) who’s founders didn’t disappear; the main difference being their deference to Beijing.
I think this explains his absence from this + the FLI letter.
He still seems to be doing public outreach though: see interview NY Times, interview with RTE, Big Think video and interview with Analytics India Magazine.
None of these interviews have discussed the email.
We know, from like a bunch of internal documents, that the New York Times has been operating for the last two or three years on a, like, grand [narrative structure], where there’s a number of head editors who are like, “Over this quarter, over this current period, we want to write lots of articles, that, like, make this point. That have this vibe. That arrive at roughly this conclusion.” And then lots of editors are being given the task of, like, finding lots of articles to write that support this conclusion. And clearly that conclusion, [in some sense is what the head editors believe], but it’s also something that, when you look at the structure of it, tends to be [of a] very political nature. It’s like, “This quarter or this year, we want to, like, destroy the influence of Silicon Valley on, like, the modern media ecosystem” or something like this.
Does anyone know what internal documents Habryka is referring to?
Is there a consensus on the idea of “training an ai to help with alignment”? What are the reasons that this would / wouldn’t be productive?
John Wentworth categorizes this as Bad Idea, but elsewhere (I cannot remember where, it may have been in irl conversations) I’ve heard it discussed as being potentially useful.
I’m curious as to why you think this since I mostly believe the opposite.
Do you mean general “induce an organism to gain a function” research (of which I agree shouldn’t be opposed) or specifically (probably what most people refer to / here) “cause a virus to become more pathogenic or lethal”?
Edit;
Your comment originally said you thought GoF research should go ahead. You’ve edited your comment to make a different point (viral GoF to transhumanist cognition enhancement).
Thus, once again, it seemed like the smart money would be on the system failing. Either the system is powerful enough to contain Covid or it is not. Exponential growth means that if containment is lost, China will have to deal with the same types of Covid problems as everyone else. That will be painful for a bit, face will be lost, and then life will return to normal. In the long run, it is inevitable.
Given the CCPs backtracking from its zero covid policy (at least for the moment), this looks like it was a pretty good prediction.
This might not need pointing out, but could still be worth saying: whatever your motivations, without providing much concrete evidence for a moderately strong claim (increase IQ by almost 1 SD in 2 weeks), it’s hard to believe you.