I write software for a living and sometimes write on substack: https://taylorgordonlunt.substack.com/
Taylor G. Lunt
Karma: 792
The Vidhaven Challenge
This possibility is explicitly mentioned in the article and does not constitute a problem for my framework.
In this case I’d say there are a combination of two factors, both outside the body: genetics, and lack of vitamin C in diet.
Stomach pain is gone because I treated the symptom with slippery elm powder. I definitely believe in treating symptoms also, just not treating symptoms only.
As for my overall health issues, I only got to the last part of the chain a few days ago, so I can’t report on how a change to my desk job will change my other health issues yet. Though I now know when my neck is strained after too many hours of sitting at my desk, or by doing neck exercises, my health issues all get worse for a few hours/days, so I’m at least not uncertain about the cause now.
I’ll write a follow-up months from now.
I can’t make a soberly argued for rationalist case for medical analysis because I’m not a doctor or even someone that interested in medicine. I just wanted to share my experience and a heuristic I find useful, and which seems to be missing from many people’s thinking about medicine.
I agree that sometimes finding the external root cause won’t be helpful, as in the case of genetic disorders (aside from stopping you from pursuing other avenues of treatment that won’t help you). But you won’t know whether finding an external root cause will help you until you do it, so in that sense it’s worth doing.
Doing a full root cause analysis may be costly, but simply not pretending we already found the root cause is not costly and misleads the patient into not finding the root cause on their own. The reason they don’t avoid such pretending is that they’re not pretending: they actually think GERD is the root cause of acid reflux, or depression is a lack of seratonin. This is a lack of clear thinking.
Obviously the human body has a bunch of self-repair and homeostasis mechanisms a car does not, but even given that, I suspect the root cause of your car issues is probably usually outside the car. Do you change your oil on time? How do you use the brakes? What climate are you driving in? How low do you let the fuel tank get before refueling? I would guess the majority of car issues come down to user behavior and environment.
You can never stop the inevitable decline from wear and tear over the years. Not so different from a human being. But during the expected useful life of the machine, I think the root causes will be mostly outside the car, and you’ll be making the exact same mistake as I pointed out in my post if you behave otherwise.
I’d like to hear some examples of root causes that you think are inside the body.
It’s a heuristic that works because it usually stops the mistake where you think you’ve identified the thing that’s wrong, but actually there’s another thing that you would like to know is wrong, but you don’t know it, in that if you found out about it, you’d be glad you found out about it.
The reason this works is that the human body is very complicated and unknown, and finding a cause outside the body means finding a cause that’s easier to reason about, like desk sitting or a toxic molecule that entered your body.
But it’s just a heuristic to help people avoid a common and dangerous mistake. Of course, the tree of causality can be traced back as far as you want, until you end up invoking the Big Bang.
I agree with you that such diseases exist. I think the rest of society is already doing a too-good job taking that kind of health issue into account, so I want to present the alternative view. And by the way, I think even with cancer, people are too quick to accept a random-chance explanation, when a round a third of cancer cases come down to lifestyle factors.
Medicine doesn’t have cures for every disease, so of course finding the root cause isn’t always going to be able to help you. Failing to find the real root cause is a trap when that failure causes you to miss out on a cure.
Many times—probably most times—damage is closer to random than recurring, and looking for causes outside the body has marginal gain compared to just fixing the body.
I mentioned GERD in my post. That’s 20% of the population walking around with a curable, externally-caused disease, almost all of whom have no idea. GERD exploded in prevalence over last few decades, so of course it’s not some randomly caused genetic disorder. 20% is a big number. There are many other diseases that follow a similar pattern. I don’t see how it could be true most of the time that disease is just random.
If my doctor told me my autoimmune condition was caused by stress triggering a genetic susceptibility, I would be very suspicious and spend a long time ruling out every other possibility. But I accept that you’re right that sometimes the outside-the-body root cause is basically too hard to figure out, or not helpful to figure out. I’d have a hard time assigning a useful probability to how often that’s the case.
How to Reason about Your Health Issues
which seems like you probably have AGI by then
This reminds me of the argument people make for the existence of life on other planets. “Sure, the chances of life on any given planet may be small, but with such a large number of planets, there’s gotta be life on one of them!”
But if there’s 700 quintillion planets, that fact alone tells you nothing. You’d also have to know that the chance of life occurring on any given planet is at least close to one in 700 quintillion, which we don’t in fact know and have no good way of estimating.
I feel your argument has a similar shape. “If we’re spending that much money on AI, then we’ve gotta reach AGI by then!” This is only true, of course, if the difficulty of achieving AGI is below a certain threshold, and we don’t know what that threshold is.
It’s a kind of relative evidence. If there are 700 quintillion planets, that makes it more likely there are aliens than if there were only a few thousand planets. But I’m still clueless as to what the actual probability is, only that it’s higher than it would have been otherwise. Same with AGI.
I was looking over AI 2027 and my own counter-predictions from 8 months ago, and it seems like I still mostly endorse my counter-predictions.
As I predicted, “large language models are still very stupid and make basic mistakes a 5-year-old would never make”, and also, “I still believe my use of AI is less than a 25% improvement to my own productivity as a programmer.” Agentic coding AI has improved more than I thought it would, but, in line with my predictions, “most breakthroughs in AI are not a result of directly increasing the general intelligence/”IQ” of the model, e.g. advances in memory, reasoning or agency.”
The most striking prediction by AI 2027 for Early 2026 was that by now, AI companies would be making “algorithmic progress 50% faster than they would without AI assistants”. This is an extraordinary prediction and as far as I can tell, this is nowhere near close to true. It seems to me that AI 2027 and reality are starting to diverge here, for basically the reasons I laid out 8 months ago (limited IQ gains/no online learning). Has anyone heard of AI researchers saying they’re 50% more productive now, in a way that is credible?
Everyone seems to be commenting on how this essay appeals to a hyper-specific subset of the population, and wouldn’t convince most people (most “normal” people). I think I agree with the general sentiment that everyone who can be convinced by this kind of essay has already been convinced.
On the other hand, I had decent success recently giving a ~7 minute speech at my local Toastmasters about AI apocalypse risk. I mostly avoided the theoretical arguments and focused on empirical evidence that AI systems are already defying our wishes (AI psychosis, other bad AI behaviour), that AI companies don’t know how to stop this from happening, and that AI is getting smarter and once smart enough will be able to outsmart us and defy us in larger, more dangerous ways. It seemed to be well-received. They were skeptical at first but not by the end. Maybe they don’t believe it in their bones that AI will really kill everyone. I’m not sure that non-”rationalist” people are really capable of feeling their beliefs in their bones in general. Instead of deciding what to believe with reason, they decide something sounds plausible, and then look around and see if other people agree. But it seems like they’re at least open to the idea that I might be right, which is more than you can ask for.
Dropping into hyper-specific arguments about no-free-lunch theorem, Ricardo’s law, decision theory, etc. is not going to be productive with normal people, because that’s not how they think. I did lean on the IABIED chess analogy of superintelligence, but it wasn’t to prove anything logically, but rather to invoke the feeling of helplessness they imagine they’d have playing chess against a grandmaster to remind them that feeling helpless against a greater intelligence isn’t impossible, so they would believe intuitively they could be helpless against superintelligence. That’s really all it took.
Most people, rather than having hyper-specific arguments you have to address, haven’t really thought about this much at all. You’re lucky if they’ve used ChatGPT or Claude. I think we need more “AI apocalypse risk 101” content. I personally admire the style of 112 Gripes about the French as a template for this kind of thing.
I was including “trying to save the world” in “whatever else you think you should be doing.”
I’m not sure I really endorse any view of identity or think it’s a coherent concept, but at the very least I think making a copy of something doesn’t make something that is that thing.
It seems like you’re projecting AI can capture >50% of GDP in the next 2-7 years (and I think your AI researchers timeline actually implies white collar work is replaced in 1-4 years), so you should invest heavily in AI. You’ll get more returns on your money from that than anything else by far, and can use the money to fund whatever else you think you should be doing.
The story seems to have prizes for different regions, and this is the winning entry for the Caribbean region.
I just read a few paragraphs, and this story’s prose is very AI-coded.
“The day the grove began to remember”
I’ve heard AI talk about a forest “remembering” at least once before. I think in the flavor text of an AI-generated trading card.
“No fan, no bulb, no hum – only the thin light slipping between warped boards...”
″...breath of hills holding their heat like a secret.”
I have also heard “like a secret” in AI prose before.
The story is very boring and pretentious. I gave up reading it. I wonder how many entries will be written by AI next year.