Unnamed

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Unnamed Oct 5, 2025, 10:20 PM
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on: The Counterfactual Quiet AGI Timeline
My leading guess is that a world without Yudkowsky, Bostrom, or any direct replacement looks a lot more similar to our actual world, at least by 2025. Perhaps: the exact individuals and organizations (and corporate structures) leading the way are different, progress is a bit behind where it is in our world (perhaps by 6 months to a year at this point), there is less attention to the possibility of doom and less focus on alignment work.
One thing that Yudkowsky et al. did is to bring more attention to the possibility of superintelligence and what it might mean, especially among the sort of techy people who could play a role in advancing ML/AI. But without them, the possibility of thinking machines was already a standard topic in intro philosophy classes, the Turing test was widely known, Deep Blue was a major cultural event, AI and robot takeover were standard topics in sci-fi, Moore’s law was widely known, people like Kurzweil and Moravec were projecting when computers would pass human capability levels, various people were trying to do what they could with the tech that they had. A lot of AI stuff was in the groundwater, especially for the sort of techy people who could play a role in advancing ML/AI. So in nearby counterfactual worlds, as there are advances in neural nets they still have ideas like trying to get these new & improved computers to be better than humans at Go, or to be much better chatbots.
Yudkowsky was also involved in networking, e.g. helping connect founders & funders. But that seems like a kind of catalyst role that speeds up the overall process slightly, rather than summoning it where it otherwise would be absent. The specific reactions that he catalyzed might not have happened without him, but it’s the sort of thing where many people were pursuing similar opportunities and so the counterfactual involves some other combination of people doing something similar, perhaps a bit later or a bit less well.

Unnamed Sep 15, 2025, 9:15 PM
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in reply to: Unnamed’s comment on: High-level actions don’t screen off intent
e.g., Betty could cause one more girl to have a mentor either by volunteering as a Big Sister or by donating money to the Big Sisters program.
In the case where she volunteers and mentors the girl directly, it takes lots of bits to describe her influence on the girl being mentored. If you try to stick to the actions->consequences framework for understanding her influence, then Betty (like a gamer) is engaging in hundreds of actions per minute in her interactions with the girl—body language, word choice, tone of voice, timing, etc. What the girl gets out of the mentoring may not depend on every single one of these actions but it probably does depend on patterns in these micro-actions. So it seems more natural to think about Betty’s fine-grained influence on the girl she’s mentoring in terms of Betty’s personality, motivations, etc., and how well she and the girl she’s mentoring click, rather than exclusively trying to track how that’s mediated by specific actions. If you wanted to know how the mentoring will go for the girl, you’d probably have questions about those sorts of things—“What is Betty like?”, “How is she with kids?”, etc.
In the case where Betty donates the money, the girl being mentored will still experience the mentoring in full detail, but most of those details won’t be coming directly from Betty so Betty’s main role is describable with just a few bits (gave $X which allowed them to recruit & support one more Big Sister). e.g., For the specific girl who got a mentor thanks to Betty’s donation, it probably doesn’t make any difference what facial expression Betty was making as she clicked the “donate” button, or whether she’s kind or bitter at the world. Though there are still some indirect paths to Betty influencing fine-grained details for girls who receive Big Sisters mentoring, as the post notes, since the organization could change its operations to try to appeal to potential donors like Betty.

Unnamed Sep 15, 2025, 9:13 PM
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on: High-level actions don’t screen off intent
I think of this as coarse-grained influence vs. fine-grained influence, which basically comes down to how many bits are needed to specify the nature of the influence.

Unnamed Aug 31, 2025, 2:37 AM
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on: Epistemic advantages of working as a moderate
I think there is a fair amount of overlap between the epistemic advantages of being a moderate (seeking incremental change from AI companies) and the epistemic disadvantages.
Many of the epistemic advantages come from being more grounded or having tighter feedback loops. If you’re trying to do the moderate reformer thing, you need to justify yourself to well-informed people who work at AI companies, you’ll get pushback from them, you’re trying to get through to them.
But those feedback loops are with that reality as interpreted by people at AI companies. So, to some degree, your thinking will get shaped to resemble their thinking. Those feedback loops will guide you towards relying on assumptions that they see as not requiring justification, using framings that resonate with them, accepting constraints that they see as binding, etc. Which will tend to lead to seeing the problem and the landscape from something more like their perspective, sharing their biases & blindspots, etc.

Unnamed Aug 12, 2025, 7:11 PM
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in reply to: Unnamed’s comment on: Negative utilitarianism is more intuitive than you think
Instead, the intuitions at play here are mainly about how to set up networks of coordination between agents. This includes
Voluntary interactions: limiting interaction with those who didn’t consent, limiting effects (especially negative effects) on those who didn’t opt in (e.g. Mill’s harm principle)
Social roles: interacting with people in a particular capacity rather than needing to consider the person in all of their humanity & complexity
Boundaries/membranes: limiting what aspects of an agent and its inner workings others have access to or can influence

Unnamed Aug 12, 2025, 7:39 AM
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on: Negative utilitarianism is more intuitive than you think
Seems like a mistake to write these intuitions into your axiology.

Unnamed Jul 30, 2025, 7:42 PM
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on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
Sounds like this agency thing is so central to how you orient to the world that you’re bringing it with you when you try to empathize with someone (at least if they’re human).
If you want to try to do something more like the sort of empathizing that other people talk about, you could try:
1. Imagining some other scenario where the way that you would relate to that other scenario matches the way that this person is relating to the scenario that they’re in.
2. Finding a case where someone is showing some of the agency thing, in a context where you wouldn’t, and empathize with them in that scenario. (This can also help with doing 1, if you also notice how you relate to this context where you wouldn’t show that agency thing, because it adds to your collection of ‘other scenarios’ which could match how someone else engages with a scenario where you would have more agency.)
3. Empathizing with people in contexts that are orthogonal to the agency thing, where how much agency a person is showing isn’t central to what’s happening. (Perhaps someone liking a book/movie/hobby/etc. that you don’t like?)

Unnamed Jul 22, 2025, 6:41 PM
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on: Generalized Hangriness: A Standard Rationalist Stance Toward Emotions
It’s standard for parents to have these sorts of models about their kids’ emotions, e.g. “She’s cranky because she didn’t get her nap.”

Unnamed Jul 22, 2025, 6:32 PM
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on: Generalized Hangriness: A Standard Rationalist Stance Toward Emotions
Related: Feeling Rational

Unnamed Jul 22, 2025, 6:31 PM
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on: Generalized Hangriness: A Standard Rationalist Stance Toward Emotions
I’ve seen hangriness-style advice circulating on twitter (via Zvi, so perhaps in the rationalist milieu) and tiktok (not in the rationalist milieu afaict).
If you feel like you hate everyone, eat
If you feel like everyone hates you, sleep
If you feel like you hate yourself, shower
If you feel like everyone hates everyone, go outside
If you feel overwhelmed by your thoughts, write them down
If you feel lost and alone, call a friend
If you feel stuck in the past, plan for the future
...

Unnamed Jul 10, 2025, 11:27 PM
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on: Lessons from the Iraq War for AI policy
The Iraq war & surrounding debate was a formative political experience for me, so I have lots of thoughts/memories/opinions about it.
I agree with the basic account: shocking events (especially 9/11) gave a source of power (the White House) a lot of freedom of action, they made some bad choices about to do with that freedom of action (in part influenced by the shocking events), and other potential sources of power (e.g. US public opinion, the Senate, the UN) which could have interfered were disinclined to (which is basically what it means for one source of power to have a lot of freedom of action).
So probably the most important takeaway is that it’s important who is in positions of power which might get lots of freedom of action depending on what events take place, what ideas & ability to execute effectively they have, and what views they will have after the key events have happened (as they have reactions to those events and reason to focus on the topic, pay attention to others’ views on it, and think about it themselves).
To go into more detail:
The national mood in the US after 9/11 (and then the DC snipers and anthrax attacks) was that the world is a dangerous place, and we need to rally together to keep ourselves safe, and trust the president to do what’s necessary to keep us safe. 9/11 was the big traumatic event, but the set of 3 attacks made a trend and heightened the sense that future attacks could happen to anyone anywhere at any time (as the DC snipers did) and could be technologically sophisticated (as the anthrax attacks were) and kill lots of people. That gave the Bush administration a ton of freedom of action to choose what to do, especially for things like starting wars to keep America safe from terrorism.
Why did George W. Bush choose war? My sense (in line with this article) is that Bush was a ‘big picture’ kind of guy who wasn’t inclined to think through the nuts & bolts of ‘what is this going to accomplish’ and ‘how else might this course of action turn out, besides going the way we want it to’. He tended to latch onto a broad narrative, and in the wake of 9/11 a narrative he found appealing was of himself as a wartime leader, fighting for freedom & democracy against terror & bad guys. The Afghanistan war on its own wasn’t enough to support this narrative so they were looking for other things to do, and Saddam Hussein was the obvious next bad guy sitting around, someone who we had unfinished business with. That Scholar’s Stage article claims (and I find it plausible) that there wasn’t actually much focused discussion within the administration about whether it was a good idea to go to war with Iraq.
The faction within the administration that had already been pushing for war with Iraq was a big part of what made Iraq the obvious next target, but that wasn’t the whole story. As the Scholar’s Stage article discusses, some people pushing for the war in 2002 had been part of the previous Iraq war in 1991, where they’d decided that it was imprudent to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and hadn’t openly changed their minds and been pushing for war in the interim.
Two of the main potential barriers to the White House’s freedom of action in choosing to go to war in Iraq were getting approval from Congress and the United Nations. I think that the zeitgeist of trusting the president to keep us safe played a huge role in getting Congress’s approval, and a weaker variant of that zeitgeist combined with American power helped with (effectively) getting UN approval. It also helped that both happened before the weapons inspectors were allowed back into Iraq. The case for war looked weaker after the weapons inspectors were allowed in and didn’t find signs of the alleged WMD programs, but by that point there was a lot of momentum towards war and the Bush administration had already gotten the authority they needed. France had pushed back on giving that authority through the UN—they wanted a two-resolution plan where first the UN would demand that Iraq let weapons inspectors in, and then after the weapons inspections the UN would reconsider whether to authorize war—and wound up reaching a compromise with the US where they made the wording of the first UN resolution ambiguous so that the US could say that the resolution authorized the war without requiring a second resolution and France could say that they hadn’t supported that. (This is the dispute that led to french fries being called “freedom fries” and the phrase “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” surging in popularity.)
I also have a lot of thoughts about the Iraq war debate, since that is what I was most immersed in at the time, though in hindsight a lot of that seems mostly epiphenomenal. This is more of a thought dump & less focused, but I’ll share anyways since some of the details & texture seem relevant:
The Bush administration’s public case for the war was more like a marketing campaign than part of a public debate over what to do. They talked a lot about how bad Saddam Hussein was (often citing stuff he’d done in the 1980s); this could be used as part of a coherent argument (and therefore he is likely to do such-and-such) but often it was just presented as an emotionally resonant argument fragment—a suggestive fact which felt like it fit with being in favor of a war to remove him from power. There were lots of mentions of 9/11 and terrorism in the context of talking about Iraq & Saddam Hussein; they weren’t explicitly claiming that Hussein had contributed to the 9/11 attack but they did manage to leave a majority of the US believing that he had been involved in 9/11 according to polls at the time. There was also a lot of talk about WMDs, some of it referencing intelligence that turned out to be inaccurate about Iraq’s weapons programs (especially chemical & biological), but much of it framed more like ‘it would be bad if Saddam Hussein got nuclear weapons’ (but rhetorically punchier) or using sleight of hand with the term “WMD” to basically say ‘we have evidence that Iraq has banned chemical weapons programs, and it would be bad if they had nukes’.
There was something more like an actual debate over whether it was a good idea to go to war with Iraq (the Slate dialogue archived here, beginning with this article, provides a pretty good snapshot of the higher quality portion of that debate). That debate took place on a slanted playing field where the pro-war side had the mantle of the zeitgeist on their side, and the anti-war side was generally on the defensive. e.g., There was often an implicit or explicit question of whether opponents of the war were apologists for Saddam Hussein, and so people making an argument against the war might head it off by including something about how they agree that Saddam Hussein is a bad person who has done some awful things. Whereas it was rarer for war proponents to include something about how Saddam Hussein hadn’t been involved in 9/11, or to get pushback for not including that (though it did sometimes happen, especially in higher quality debates or discussions among people who were left-of-center or more distrusting of the Bush administration).
There were a wide range of pro-war cases, including (more on the left) “liberal internationalists” who wanted there to be more constitutional liberal democracies and thought that toppling a bad government and replacing it with a good one was a feasible and good thing to do, and might spread to more of the middle east and make the world a safer place. Others (more on the right) wanted the US to kick some ass so that people/countries would be afraid of getting America mad at them, and that this would help keep us safe. Or, more viscerally & less strategically, some just wanted to get back at people like the ones who had attacked us. There was some tension between these views, and not much effort to create a single coherent view out of them; they were all welcomed into the pro-war coalition.
I think part of the reason that support for the war faded gradually over the years, rather than evaporating during the first year of the war when it became apparent that Iraq didn’t have meaningful WMD programs (or before the war when the weapons inspections didn’t find anything) is that there were so many different cases for war. Partly this is because there were multiple coherent views on the point of the war that got discredited at different times—getting bogged down in a seemingly endless quagmire eventually undermined the “we’ll kick ass so hard that others will be afraid to cross us because they might be next”, and the developments of the new Iraqi government eventually undermined the liberal internationalist case, but those took longer than the WMD info. But I think a bigger part was that the pro-war attitude was more like vibes and side-taking rather than specific arguments about a concrete purpose for the war—see the post-9/11 rallying around the flag, the backlash against France, the “you’re with us or your against us” talk & attitude, etc. Much of the debate & discussion over the war was more like this kind of side-taking than like arguments over whether we should go to war. Another example: saying that the war wouldn’t succeed at accomplishing its proponents goals was often treated as being “defeatist” and felt to some degree like it was siding against the war and against the US. To some degree this side-taking intensified after the start of the war, because then the pro-war side was the American side.

Unnamed Jun 21, 2025, 9:31 PM
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on: the silk pajamas effect
I think that the 2 main factors behind the age distribution in professional sports are:
1. Athleticism declines with age and athleticism is a major contributor to being good at sports. You can see this in the pattern of which players do stick around into their 30s—they are often players who have a role that is less dependent on athleticism (e.g. in the NFL kickers, punters, quarterbacks, and long snappers, in the NBA very tall big men) or star players who were much better than baseline in their prime so they continued to be useful even when they weren’t as good as they used to be. (Injuries are a component of this—one way that a person’s athleticism can decline is if they get an injury that they never fully recover from; also older people tend to recover more slowly from injuries and playing through a nagging injury is another way of having reduced athleticism.)
2. Option value for young players: Young players can get a chance on a professional franchise when there’s uncertainty about how good they are or will become, based on the possibility that they will turn out to be good enough to be useful. Players who are out of the NBA or NFL in 2 years are usually players who were never quite good enough to play at that level, but who got a brief chance to be on a roster (or multiple rosters) based on the hope that they were before it became clear that they weren’t good enough.

Unnamed Jun 9, 2025, 12:47 AM
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in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Kaj’s shortform feed
Seems misleading.

”Shared Environment” measures to what extent children raised in the same household wind up more similar than children raised in different households. If tailoring your parenting approach to each child helps children develop more agency, happiness, etc., and some households have parents that do this more/better than others, then it would show up as a Shared Environment effect on measures related to agency, happiness, etc.

Unnamed May 23, 2025, 7:07 PM
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on: D&D.Sci: The Choosing Ones
Did a little data exploration and then tried
k nearest neighbors. That seemed good enough to provide answers, though it didn’t provide deep understanding. I’ll pick
candidate 11, and for the bonus questions
Holly has the best ratings in isolation, Colleen is a redundant copycat and Amy is noise, and as backups I like 7 and then 19.

Unnamed May 20, 2025, 9:18 PM
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in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Thomas Kwa’s Shortform
The ‘regression to the mean’ pattern is striking: domains with a lower starting point have been growing faster, and those that started with a longer horizon have mostly been grower slower.
I wonder if that pattern of catchup growth & drag on leaders will mostly hold up over more time and with a larger set of task types.

Unnamed May 20, 2025, 6:35 PM
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in reply to: Warty’s comment on: Warty’s Shortform
That seems like an instance of a general story for why markets are good: if something is priced too low people can buy it up and make a profit. It’s a not very impressive way for markets to be impressive.
If you’d said “not surprising” instead of “not impressive” then maybe I would’ve been on board. It’s not that surprising that prediction markets are good at calibration because we already knew that markets are good at that sort of thing. That seems basically true, for certain groups of “we”. Though my attitude is still more check it out: it works like we thought it would rather than nothing to see here, this is just what we expected.

Unnamed May 20, 2025, 1:01 AM
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in reply to: Warty’s comment on: Warty’s Shortform
Disagree. It’s possible to get a good calibration chart in unimpressive ways, but that’s not how Polymarket & Manifold got their calibration, so their calibration is impressive.
To elaborate: It’s possible to get a good calibration graph by only predicting “easy” questions (e.g. the p-weighted coin), or by predicting questions that are gameable if you ignore discernment (e.g. ¹⁄₃₂ for each team to win the Super Bowl), or with an iterative goodharting strategy (e.g. seeing that too many of your “20%” forecasts have happened so then predicting “20%” for some very unlikely things). But forecasting platforms haven’t been using these kinds of tricks, and aren’t designed to. They came by their calibration the hard way, while predicting a diverse set of substantive questions one at a time & aiming for discernment as well as calibration. That’s an accomplishment.

Unnamed Feb 6, 2025, 2:20 AM
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in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Assume Bad Faith
This post begins:
I’ve been trying to avoid the terms “good faith” and “bad faith”. I’m suspicious that most people who have picked up the phrase “bad faith” from hearing it used, don’t actually know what it means—and maybe, that the thing it does mean doesn’t carve reality at the joints.
People get very touchy about bad faith accusations: they think that you should assume good faith, but that if you’ve determined someone is in bad faith, you shouldn’t even be talking to them, that you need to exile them.
The second paragraph uses the term “bad faith” or “good faith” three times. What substance is it pointing to?
AFAICT the post never fleshes this out. The ‘hidden motives’ definition that Zack gave fleshes out his understanding of the term, which is different from what these people mean.
Tabooing words, when different people are using the word differently, typically means giving substance to both meanings (e.g. “acoustic vibrations” and “auditory experiences” for sound).
If Zack wanted to set aside the question of what other people mean by “bad faith” and just think about some things using his understanding of the term, then he could’ve done that. (To me that seems less interesting than also engaging with what other people mean by the term, and it would’ve made it a bit strange to start the post this way, but it still seems like a fine direction to go.) That’s not what this post did, though. It keeps coming back to what other people think about bad faith, without tracking that there are different meanings.
Consider this from Zack: “The conviction that “bad faith” is unusual contributes to a warped view of the world”. This is more on the topic of what other people think about “bad faith”. Which meaning of “bad faith” is it using? If it means Zack’s ‘hidden motives’ definition then it’s unclear if people do have the conviction that that’s unusual, because when people use the words “bad faith” that’s not what they’re talking about. If it means whatever people do mean by the words “bad faith”, then we’re back to discussing some substance that hasn’t been fleshed out, and it’s unclear if their conviction that it’s rare contributes to a warped view of the world because it’s unclear what that conviction even is.

Unnamed Feb 5, 2025, 11:27 PM
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in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Assume Bad Faith
The “Taboo bad faith” title doesn’t fit this post. I had hoped from the opening section that it was going in that direction, but it did not.
Most obviously, the post kept relying heavily on the terms “bad faith” and “good faith” and that conceptual distinction, rather than tabooing them.
But also, it doesn’t do the core intellectual work of replacing a pointer with its substance. In the opening scenario where someone accuses their conversation partner of bad faith, conveying something along the lines of ‘I disapprove of how you’re approaching this conversation so I’m leaving’, tabooing “bad faith” would mean articulating what pattern of behavior (they thought that) they saw and why disapproval & departure is an appropriate response. Zack doesn’t try to do this, he just abandons this scenario to talk about other things involving his definition of “bad faith”. (And similarly with “assume good faith”.) I briefly hoped that the post would go in the “taboo your words” direction, describing what was happening in that sort of scenario with a clarity and precision that would make the label “bad faith” seem crude by comparison, but it did not.
This post also doesn’t manage to avoid the main pitfall that tabooing a word is meant to prevent, where people talk past each other because they’re using the same word with different definitions. Even though he says at the start of the post that other people are using the term “bad/good faith” wrong according his understanding of the term, when he talks about the advice “assume good faith” he just plugs in his definition of “good faith” (and “assume”) without noting that he’s making an interpretation of what other people mean when they use the phrase and that they might mean something else. And similarly in other places like “being touchy about bad faith accusations seems counterproductive” and “the belief that persistent good faith disagreements are common would seem to be in bad faith”. When someone says “you’re acting in bad faith” are they claiming that you’re showing the thing that Zack means by “bad faith”? Keeping that sort of thing straight is rationality 101 stuff that tabooing words helps with, and which this post repeatedly stumbles over.

Unnamed Feb 5, 2025, 12:52 AM
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on: EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem
I’m voting against including this in the Review, at max level, because I think it too-often mischaracterizes the views of the people it quotes. And it seems real bad for a post that is mainly about describing other people’s views and the drawing big conclusions from that data to inaccurately describe those views and then draw conclusions from inaccurate data.

I’d be interested in hearing about this from people who favor putting this post in the review. Did you check on the sources for some of Elizabeth’s claims and think that she described them well? Did you see some inaccuracies but figure that the post is still good enough? Did you trust Elizabeth’s descriptions without checking yourself on what the person said?
I spent a fair amount of time spot checking Elizabeth’s first section, on Martin Soto, which got my attention because it seemed like it could be one of her strongest and it was the first. This claim from Elizabeth in that section seems clearly false: “The charitable explanation here is that my post focuses on naive veganism, and Soto thinks that’s a made-up problem”. The first few paragraphs quoted in this post are sufficient to falsify this interpretation, and the first comment that Martin left on Elizabeth’s post is too. Other parts of the description of Martin’s views which are more central to Elizabeth’s argument also seem off, though sorting them out requires getting more in the weeds. e.g. AFAICT he didn’t say he opposed talking about the whole topic of vegan nutrition; he did say something along the lines of ‘you didn’t say anything false, but I don’t like the way you presented things because it’ll have bad consequences’, but that’s a pretty normal type of opinion—Elizabeth said something like that about Will MacAskill in another post in this series.
Other places where this post felt off include Elizabeth’s description of what people were trying to claim when they brought up the Adventist study, and the claim that this comment by Wilkox involved frame control (it doesn’t look like Wilkox was trying to force their frame on the conversation; rather, it looks like Elizabeth brought a strong frame to the “Change my mind” post, Wilkox didn’t immediately buy into it and was trying to think through the overall frame that Elizabeth brought and the specific concrete claims that Elizabeth made).
There are other examples in the comments, e.g. this comment by Wilkox (currently at +12 net agree-vote, w/o a vote from me) gives 6 examples where the post’s “description of what was said seems to misrepresent the source text”, with some overlap with my examples and some I haven’t looked into.
Before doing these spot checks I was inclined to vote against this post for the review at −1 because it didn’t seem to live up to the title. It was trying to do a hard thing and didn’t pull it off—or at least, I didn’t get a particularly clear sense of the nature and extent of epistemic problems within EA vegan advocacy and had just cached the post as ‘Elizabeth’s upset about EA vegan epistemics’. After digging in to some of it more closely, it looks like it did a worse job than I’d thought, so I’ve moved my vote downward and written this review.