Yair Halberstadt(Yair Halberstadt)

Karma: 2,341

Yair Halberstadt 25 Jul 2024 19:52 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: PeterMcCluskey’s comment on: The Cancer Resolution?

I very much did not miss that.

I would consider this one of the most central points to clarify, yet the OP doesn’t discuss it at all, and your response to it being pointed out was 3 sentences, despite there being ample research on the topic which points strongly in the opposite direction.

Where did I say that?

I never said you said it, I said the book contains such advice:

Lintern suggests that chemotherapy is generally a bad idea.

Yair Halberstadt 25 Jul 2024 5:03 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: The Cancer Resolution?
Now it can be very frustrating to hear “you can’t have an opinion on this because you’re not an expert”, and it sounds very similar to credentialism.

But it’s not. If you’d demonstrated a mastery of the material, and came up with a convincing description of current evidence for the DNA theory and why you believe it’s incorrect, evidence which is not pulled straight out of the book you’re reviewing, I wouldn’t care what your credentials are.

But you seem to have missed really obvious consequences of the fungi theory, like, “wouldn’t it be infectious then”, and all the stuff in J Bostock’s excellent comment. At that point it seems like you’ve read a book by a probable crank, haven’t even thought through the basic counterarguments, and are spreading it around despite it containing some potentially pretty dangerous advice like “don’t do chemotherapy”. This is not the sort of content I find valuable on LessWrong, so I heavily downvoted.

Yair Halberstadt 25 Jul 2024 4:57 UTC
6 points
3
on: The Cancer Resolution?
I want to take a look at the epistemics of this post, or rather, whether this post should have been written at all.

In 95% of cases someone tearing down the orthodoxy of a well established field is a crank. In another 4% of cases they raise some important points, but are largely wrong. In 1% of cases they are right and the orthodoxy has to be rewritten from scratch.

Now these 1% of cases are extremely important! It’s understandable why the rationalist community, which has a healthy skepticism of orthodoxy would be interested in finding them. And this is probably a good thing.

But you have to have the expertise with which to do so. If you do not have an extremely solid grasp of cancer research, and you highlight a book like this, 95% of the time you are highlighting a crank, and that doesn’t do anyone any good. From what I can make out from this post (and correct me if I’m wrong) you do not have any such expertise.

Now there are people on LessWrong who do have the necessary expertise, and I would value it if they were to either spend 10 seconds looking at the synopsis and saying “total nonsense, not even worth investigating” Vs “I’ll delve into that when I get the time”. But for anyone who doesn’t have the expertise, your best bet is just to go with the orthodoxy. There’s an infinite amount of bullshit to get through before you find the truth, and a book review of probable bullshit doesn’t actually help anyone.

Yair Halberstadt 16 Jul 2024 5:34 UTC
2 points
0
on: I found >800 orthogonal “write code” steering vectors

And it turns out that this algorithm works and we can find steering vectors that are orthogonal (and have ~0 cosine similarity) while having very similar effects.

Why ~0 and not exactly 0? Are these not perfectly orthogonal? If not, would it be possible to modify them slightly so they are perfectly orthogonal, then repeat, just to exclude Fabien Roger’s hypothesis?

Yair Halberstadt 14 Jul 2024 6:06 UTC
12 points
1
in reply to: gilch’s comment on: Ice: The Penultimate Frontier
It’s not that we can’t colonise Alaska, it’s that it’s not economically productive to do so.

I wouldn’t expect colonising mars to be economically productive, but instead to be funded by other sources (essentially charity).

Yair Halberstadt 4 Jul 2024 14:46 UTC
21 points
17
on: Consider the humble rock (or: why the dumb thing kills you)
I think the chances that something that doesn’t immediately kill humanity, and isn’t actively trying to kill humanity, polishes us off for good is pretty low at the very least.

Humans have survived as hunter gatherers for a million years. We’ve thrived in every possible climate under the sun. We’re not just going to roll over and die because civilisation has collapsed.

Not that this is much of a comfort if 99% of humanity dies.

Yair Halberstadt 1 Jul 2024 3:20 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: FlorianH’s comment on: Book Review: Righteous Victims—A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict
Thanks for the point. I think I’m not really taking to that sort of person? My intended audience is the average American who views the USA as mostly a force for good, even if its foreign policy can be misguided at times.

Yair Halberstadt 28 Jun 2024 4:58 UTC
22 points
3
on: Secondary forces of debt
1. Historically European Jews were money lenders since Christians were forbidden to charge interest. This was one of the major forces behind the pogroms, since killing the debt holders saved you having to pay up.
2. On a country level scale this is significant. If you live in a dangerous area, you want the USA to have invested a lot of money in you which they will lose if you ever are conquered.
3. People claiming that debts are inherited by the estate: this only applies to formal, legible debts. If you lend money informally (possibly because there’s a criminal element involved), or the debt is an informal obligation to provide services/respect then once the debt holder dies it’s often gone.
4. Even for many types of legible debt, once the debt holder dies it’s very difficult for the estate to know the debt exists or it’s status. If old Joey Richbanks lends me 10 million dollars, witnessed and signed in a contract, who says his children are ever going to find the contract? And if they do, and I claim I already paid it, how certain are they I’m lying? And how likely are they to win the court case if so?

Yair Halberstadt 27 Jun 2024 13:24 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Book Review: Righteous Victims—A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict
Putting on my reasonable Israeli nationalist hat:

“Of course, granting a small number of well behaved Palestinians citizenship in Israel is not a problem, and as it happens that occurs at a small scale all the time (e.g. family unification laws, east Jerusalem residents).

But there’s a number of issues with that:
1. No vetting is perfect, some terrorists/bad cultural fits will always slip through the gap.
2. Even if this person is a great cultural fit, there’s no guarantee their children will be, or that they won’t pull in other people through family unification laws.
3. There’s a risk of a democratic transition—the more Arab voters, the more power they have, the more they can open the gates to more Arabs, till Israel siezes to be a Jewish state.
4. We don’t trust the government to only keep it at a small scale.
Now let’s turn it around:

Why should we do this? What do we have to gain for taking on this risk?”

Yair Halberstadt 27 Jun 2024 4:20 UTC
11 points
5
in reply to: Andrew Burns’s comment on: Andrew Burns’s Shortform
There seems to be a huge jump from: there’s no moat around generative AI (makes sense as how to make one is publicly known, and the secret sauce is just about improving performance) to… all the other stuff which seems completely unrelated?

Yair Halberstadt 26 Jun 2024 15:31 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Benaya Koren’s comment on: Book Review: Righteous Victims—A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict
I agree that making places which will definitely be part of Israel in any future two state solutions denser, whilst not increasing footprint, or access to neighbouring land is not inherently problematic.

But give people an inch and they will take a mile. From the US perspective far easier to just deliver an ultimatum on settlement building full stop. Besides, the fewer settlers, the fewer troublemakers, so that’s another advantage.

Also that provides an incentive for those who live in the settlements to come to an agreement on a two state solution since that will free up their land for further building.

I agree that they should turn a blind eye to small scale refurbishment/rebuilding of existing housing stock, but should object to any Greenfield building, or major projects.

Yair Halberstadt 26 Jun 2024 4:03 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: On Claude 3.5 Sonnet
I think one way of framing it is whether the improvements to itself outweigh the extra difficulty in eking out more performance. Basically does the performance converge or diverge.

Yair Halberstadt 25 Jun 2024 12:58 UTC
4 points
2
on: I’m a bit skeptical of AlphaFold 3
This makes sense, but isn’t alphafold available for use? Is it possible to verify this one way or another experimentally?

Yair Halberstadt 25 Jun 2024 6:24 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: rsaarelm’s comment on: Sci-Fi books micro-reviews
Might be worth posting this as it’s own question for greater visibility

Yair Halberstadt 25 Jun 2024 5:49 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: metachirality’s comment on: Sci-Fi books micro-reviews
Possibly, but some of the missteps just feel too big to ignore. Like what on earth is going on in the second half of the book?

Yair Halberstadt 25 Jun 2024 5:32 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: trevor’s comment on: Sci-Fi books micro-reviews
I greatly enjoyed metropolitan man, but feel like web serials, especially fan fiction, are their own genre and deserve their own post.

Yair Halberstadt 25 Jun 2024 2:35 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Richard Horvath’s comment on: Sci-Fi books micro-reviews
It’s a prequel in the loosest possible sense. In theory they could be set in two different universes and it wouldn’t make much of a difference.

Yair Halberstadt 24 Jun 2024 12:52 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Michael Roe’s comment on: Sci-Fi books micro-reviews
Oh (not a spoiler) the second narrator is obviously not being entirely truthful.
That’s totally a spoiler :-), but for me it was one of the most brilliant twists in the book. You have this stuff that feels like the author is doing really poor sci-fi, and then it’s revealed that the author is perfectly aware of that and is making a point about translation.

Yair Halberstadt 24 Jun 2024 12:49 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Stephen Fowler’s comment on: Sci-Fi books micro-reviews
Thanks, really appreciate the feedback! Maybe I’ll give The Three Body Problem another chance.

Book Review: Righteous Victims—A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict

Yair Halberstadt24 Jun 2024 11:02 UTC

47 points

7 comments34 min readLW link

Yair Halberstadt(Yair Halberstadt)

Book Re­view: Righ­teous Vic­tims—A His­tory of the Zion­ist-Arab Conflict

Book Review: Righteous Victims—A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict