I do not particularly want to dismiss Miller and Rootclaim’s arguments. They have just made it very difficult to see their arguments by burying them in a 17-hour long debate series.
My hourly rate is $200. I will accept a donation of $5000 to sit down and watch the entire Miller/Rootclaim debate and write a 2000 word piece describing how I updated on it and why, feel free to message me if you want to go ahead and fund this.
Alternatively, once it has been judged I’m sure someone will write it up and I can read that and potentially change my mind.
I’m not dismissing the complicated arguments. I’m dismissing a specific highly obfuscated bundle of data unless you pay me to un-obfuscate it or someone else does. I have addressed (some of, but not all) the complicated arguments in the post
I think it’s less your obligation to weed through a 17 hour debate than it is Algon’s obligation, who implies he watched the debate, to list here the arguments that convinced him that the lab-leak hypothesis is false.
I think it is Roko’s obligation to do a better job of researching and addressing counter-arguments before making a post like this one. It contains absolutely nowhere near sufficient justification for the accusations it is leveling.
So, from my perspective there are two different issues, one epistemic, and the one game-theoretic.
From the epistemic perspective, I would like to know (as part of a general interest in truth) what the true source of the pandemic was.
From the game-theoretic perspective, I think we have sufficiently convincing evidence that someone attempted to cover up the possibility that they were the source of the pandemic. (I think Roko’s post doesn’t include as much evidence as it could: he points to the Lancet article but not the part of it that’s calling lab leak a conspiracy theory, he doesn’t point to the released email discussions, etc.) I think the right strategy is to assume guilt in the presence of a coverup, because then someone who is genuinely uncertain as to whether or not they caused the issue is incentivized to cooperate with investigations instead of obstruct them.
That is, even if further investigation shows that COVID did not originate from WIV, I still think it’s a colossal crime to have dismissed the possibility of a lab leak and have fudged the evidence (or, at the very least, conflicted the investigations).
I think it’s also pretty obvious that the social consensus is against lab leak not because all the experts have watched the 17 hour rootclaim debate, but because it was manufactured, which makes me pretty unsympathetic to the “researching and addressing counter-arguments” claim; it reminds me of the courtier’s reply.
What the social consensus is and why it exists are not relevant to the point I was making. This post is accusing specific individuals of mass murder, claiming they are responsible for millions of deaths. If you just want to say that you don’t believe the expert consensus, that’s one thing, but that just leaves you in a state of uncertainty. This post expresses a tremendous amount of certainty, and the mere fact that debate was stifled cannot possibly demonstrate that the stifled side is actually correct.
I think it’s plausible—perhaps even likely—that the FBI, Secret Service, and various other agencies may have messed up the investigation in to the JFK assassination as well as acted or even colluded with each other to hide their own incompetence at protecting the president and during the aforementioned initial investigation. But this doesn’t mean they were the ones who assassinated him!
There is a large amount of material that is publicly available to be analyzed that might weigh on the question of Covid’s origins, as well as many arguments one could make. The Rootclaim debate covers much of it, but I’m sure not all. These data could be evaluated. Roko has not done that; the arguments and evidence here and in their other threads is extremely weak compared to the level of confidence that is expressed, or the level of confidence that would be required to level these accusations. Roko has clearly spent a lot of time making this post, his other 2 posts, various comments, and obnoxious comments on the Manifold thread about who would win the rootclaim debate, and has apparently done at least some research to support his claims. But when it’s pointed out that his grasp of the facts is lacking, his response is to say “pay me $200 an hour.” This is such obviously motivated reasoning that it is frankly an embarrassment for this post to have over 200 net upvotes.
I think the right strategy is to assume guilt in the presence of a coverup, because then someone who is genuinely uncertain as to whether or not they caused the issue is incentivized to cooperate with investigations instead of obstruct them.
This might have strategic usefulness, but that doesn’t mean it’s accurate. There are reasons why this video exists, one of which is because people don’t always behave rationally in situations like this.
That is, even if further investigation shows that COVID did not originate from WIV, I still think it’s a colossal crime to have dismissed the possibility of a lab leak and have fudged the evidence (or, at the very least, conflicted the investigations).
It was terrible, and likely backfired, but that isn’t “the crime of the century” being referenced, that would be the millions of dead people.
This post expresses a tremendous amount of certainty, and the mere fact that debate was stifled cannot possibly demonstrate that the stifled side is actually correct.
Agreed on the second half, and disagreed on the first. Looking at the version history, the first version of this post clearly identifies its core claims as Roko’s beliefs and as the lab as being the “likely” origin, and those sections seem unchanged to today. I don’t think that counts as tremendous certainty. Later, Roko estimates the difference in likelihoods between two hypotheses as being 1000:1, but this is really not a tremendous amount either.
What do you wish he had said instead of what he actually said?
It was terrible, and likely backfired, but that isn’t “the crime of the century” being referenced, that would be the millions of dead people.
As I clarify in a comment elsewhere, I think we should treat them as being roughly equally terrible. If we would execute someone for accidentally killing millions of people, I think we should also execute them for destroying evidence that they accidentally killed millions of people, even if it turns out they didn’t do it.
My weak guess is Roko is operating under a similar strategy and not being clear enough on the distinction the two halves of “they likely did it and definitely covered it up”. Like, the post title begins with “Brute Force Manufactured Consensus”, which he feels strongly about in this case because of the size of the underlying problem, but I think it’s also pretty clear he is highly opposed to the methodology.
I don’t think that’s counts as tremendous certainty.
“Brute Force Manufactured consensus is hiding the Crime of the Century (emphasis mine). Although the post contains the statement “I believe” it doesn’t really express any other reservations, qualifiers, or uncertainty. It doesn’t present or consider any evidence for the alternatives.
For the love of Bayes! How many times do you have to rerun history for a naturally occurring virus to randomly appear outside the lab that’s studying it at the exact time they are studying it?
If it’s not a lot of evidence, then taking this post at face value, what would one conclude is the probability that covid came from a lab? edit: And if it’s not a lot of evidence, is it ok to accuse someone of mass murder with that amount of evidence?
I think we should treat them as being roughly equally terrible.
Well I think this is pretty wild, but that’s beside the point, as this isn’t what the post actually says:
prosecute what I believe is the crime of the century: a group of scientists who I believe committed the equivalent of a modern holocaust (either deliberately or accidentally) are going to get away with it. For those who are not aware, the death toll of Covid-19 is estimated at between 19 million and 35 million.
It would also be very strange for the post to have a bunch of content which is clearly supposed to be evidence that Covid was, in fact, a lab leak, and not just evidence that Peter Daszak tried to bury evidence if the point is simply that hiding evidence is bad.
It doesn’t present or consider any evidence for the alternatives.
So, in the current version of the post (which is edited from the original) Roko goes thru the basic estimate of “probability of this type of virus, location, and timing” given spillover and lab leak, and discounts other evidence in this paragraph:
These arguments are fairly robust to details about specific minor pieces of evidence or analyses. Whatever happens with all the minor arguments about enzymes and raccoon dogs and geospatial clustering, you still have to explain how the virus found its way to the place that got the first BSL-4 lab and the top Google hits for “Coronavirus China”, and did so in slightly less than 2 years after the lifting of the moratorium on gain-of-function research. And I don’t see how you can explain that other than that covid-19 escaped from WIV or a related facility in Wuhan.
I don’t think that counts as presenting it, but I do think that counts as considering it. I think it’s fine to question whether or not the arguments are robust to those details—I think they generally are and have not been impressed by any particular argument in favor of zoonosis that I’ve seen, mostly because I don’t think they properly estimate the probability under both hypotheses[1]--but I don’t think it’s the case that Roko is clearly making procedural errors here. [It seems to me like you’re arguing he’s making procedural errors instead of just combing to the wrong conclusion / using the wrong numbers, and so I’m focusing on that as the more important point.]
If it’s not a lot of evidence
This is what numbers are for. Is “1000-1” a lot? Is it tremendous? Who cares about fuzzy words when the number 1000 is right there. (I happen to think 1000-1 is a lot but is not tremendous.)
For example, the spatial clustering analysis suggests that the first major transmission event was at the market. But does their model explicitly consider both “transfer from animal to many humans at the market” and “transfer from infected lab worker to many humans at the market” and estimate probabilities for both? I don’t think so, and I think that means it’s not yet in a state where it can be plugged into the full Bayesian analysis. I think you need to multiply the probability that it was from the lab times the first lab-worker superspreader event happening at the market and compare that to the probability that it was from an animal times the first animal-human superspreader event happening at the market, and then you actually have some useful numbers to compare.
I would describe that as dismissing counter-evidence out of hand; it’s trivially easy to answer the question as stated, even if you don’t believe that particular story. In any event, this seems like arguing over semantics. I think that accusing someone of a being responsible for several million deaths requires quite strong evidence, and that a pretty key component of presenting strong evidence is seriously addressing counter-arguments and counter-evidence. None of Roko’s posts do that.
[It seems to me like you’re arguing he’s making procedural errors instead of just combing to the wrong conclusion / using the wrong numbers, and so I’m focusing on that as the more important point.
Sure. For example, he’s making the exact procedural error you describe in your footnote, by failing to consider how likely the genetic evidence is under the lab leak hypothesis, or if any other cities would look suspicious as the starting location of a pandemic, etc. He’s failing to apply consistent levels of skepticism to sources. But the biggest issue, in my mind, is still just not giving the question the level of consideration it requires. (I’m drafting an actual post so more detailed object-level arguments can go there when I’m done).
This is what numbers are for. Is “1000-1” a lot? Is it tremendous? Who cares about fuzzy words when the number 1000 is right there. (I happen to think 1000-1 is a lot but is not tremendous.)
I’m not sure what the point of arguing about the definition of “tremendous” is. If I had written “a lot” instead of “a tremendous amount” would anything substantial change?
I think the right strategy is to assume guilt in the presence of a coverup, because then someone who is genuinely uncertain as to whether or not they caused the issue is incentivized to cooperate with investigations instead of obstruct them.
There are two ways I can read this. The first is that when we catch people covering up evidence that points to them committing a crime, we should assume that they’re guilty of the underlying crime. That seems pretty bad because it’s not necessarily true (altho the coverup is some evidence for it). The second is that you should assume they’re guilty of the crime of covering up relevant info, and treat them as such. That does sound right, but it doesn’t justify you in talking about the underlying crime as if you know who’s guilty of it.
I think it’s also pretty obvious that the social consensus is against lab leak not because all the experts have watched the 17 hour rootclaim debate, but because it was manufactured
I agree that the virology and epidemiology communities didn’t watch the rootclaim debate, but I feel like this is jumping to the conclusion that they’re gullible, rather than that they’re just familiar with a bunch of data and are integrating it sensibly. The main thing that plays against it is low familiarity with the DEFUSE proposal in the GCRI survey, but I think that’s plausibly explained by people not having read the whole thing (it’s really long!).
I mean a third way, which is that covering up or destroying evidence of X should have a penalty of roughly the same severity as X. (Like, you shouldn’t assume they covered it up, you should require evidence that they covered it up.)
I feel like this is jumping to the conclusion that they’re gullible
I think you’re pushing my statement further than it goes. Not everyone in a group has to be gullible for the social consensus of the group to be driven by gullibility, and manufactured consensus itself doesn’t require gullibility. (My guess is that more people are complicit than gullible, and more people are refusing-to-acknowledge ego-harmful possibilities than clear-mindedly setting out to deceive the public.)
To elaborate on my “courtier’s reply” comment, and maybe shine some light on ‘gullibility’, it seems to me like most religions maintain motive force thru manufactured consensus. I think if someone points that out—”our prior should be that this religion is false and propped up by motivated cognition and dysfunctional epistemic social dynamics”—and someone else replies with “ah, but you haven’t engaged with all of the theological work done by thinkers about that religion”, I think the second reply does not engage with the question of what our prior should be. I think we should assume religions are false by default, while being open to evidence.
I think similarly the naive case is that lab leak is substantially more likely than zoonosis, but not so overwhelmingly that there couldn’t be enough evidence to swing things back in favor of zoonosis. If that was the way the social epistemology had gone—people thought it was the lab, there was a real investigation and the lab was cleared—then I would basically believe the consensus and think the underlying process was valid.
This is the kind of thing you do before you make a big post accusing someone of “the crime of the century.” I don’t know how you even thought this was remotely reasonable. This is basically just Pascal’s mugging, except that the worst you can do is harm the reputation of the community… “pay me or I might make really bad posts.”
I think it’s less your obligation to weed through a 17 hour debate than it is Algon’s obligation, who implies he watched the debate, to list here the arguments that convinced him that the lab-leak hypothesis is false.
I mean I am responsible for my own thoughts. If I am wrong it is my fault.
I read summaries and watched some of the debate, because I too am lazy. That’s why I linked to Daniel Filan’s thread on the debate. Also, Peter and Rootclaim are working on a condensed version of the three debates, which should be couple hours long.
I tried to look at Daniel Filan’s tweets. The roughly 240 posts long megathread is a largely unstructed stream of consciousness that appears hard to read. He doesn’t seem to make direct arguments so much as it is a scratchpad for thoughts and questions that occured to the author while listening to the debate. The mere act of pointing to such a borderline unreadable thread IMHO doesn’t itself constitute a significant counterargument, nor does the act of referring to the prospect of a future summary article. Reasonable norms of good debate suggest relevant counterarguments should be proportional in length and readability to the original argument, which in this case is Rokos compact nine-minute post.
Again, imagine me making a case for or against AI risk by pointing to a 17-hour YouTube debate and to an overly long and convoluted Twitter thread of the thoughts of some guy who listened to the debate. I think few would take me seriously.
I also note that you originally seemed to suggest you watched the debate in whole, while you now sound as if you watched only parts of it and read Daniel Filan’s thread. If this alone really got you “from about 70% likelihood of a lab-leak to about 1-5%”, then I think it should be easy for you to post an object-level counterargument to Roko’s post.
(Apart from that, Daniel Filan himself says he is 75-80% convinced of the zoonosis hypothesis, in contrast to your 95-99%, while also noting that this estimate doesn’t even include considerations about genetic evidence which he apparently expects to favor the lab-leak hypothesis. He also says: “Oh also this is influenced by the zoonosis guy being more impressive, which may or may not be a bias.” Though pointing to other people’s credences doesn’t provide a significant argument for anything unless there is also evidence this individual is unusually reliable at making such judgements.)
> Reasonable norms of good debate suggest relevant counterarguments should be proportional in length and readability to the original argument, which in this case is Rokos compact nine-minute post.
This seems entirely *un*reasonable to me. Some arguments simply can’t be properly made that concisely, and this principle seems to bias us towards finding snappy, simplistic explanations rather than true ones.
Someone else mentioned ‘The Pyramid and the Garden’, but I’m reminded of the sort of related argument about Atlantis in https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/ : sometimes, boring reality and ‘it’s actually just a series of coincidences’ requires a lot more explaining than a neat little conspiracy theory. Not to tar the lab leak hypothesis by calling it a conspiracy theory- while of course it literally is one, it doesn’t deserve to be demeaned by the term’s modern connotation of zany insane-person nonsense- but it is easy to see why ‘these facts seems unlikely to be a coincidence’ might be easier to argue concisely than its rebuttal, and a norm where the person that can state their argument more persuasively in shortform wins doesn’t seem like one that’s going to promote optimal truth-seeking.
The problem with “lab-leak is unlikely, look at this 17-hour debate” is that it is too short an argument, not a too long one. Arguments don’t get substituted by merely referring to them. The expression “the Riemann hypothesis” is not synonymous with the Riemann hypothesis. The former just refers to the latter. You can understand one without understanding the other.
On average, every argument gets more indirect the less accessible it is, and inaccessibility is strongly dependent on length, as well as language, intelligibility, format etc.
It may be that the 17-hour debate cannot be summarized adequately (depending on some standard of adequacy) in a nine-minute post, but a nine-minute post would be much more adequate than “lab-leak is unlikely, look at this 17-hour debate”.
The problem with “lab-leak is unlikely, look at this 17-hour debate” is that it is too short an argument, not a too long one.
It isn’t an argument, it’s a citation.
I don’t think a 17 hour debate is “inaccessible” to someone who is invested in this issue and making extremely strong, potentially very seriously libellous claims without having investigated some of the central arguments on the question at hand.
A foundational text in some academic field might take 17 hours to read, but you would still expect someone to have read it before making a priori wild claims that contradicted the expert consensus of that field very radically. I don’t think you’d take that person seriously at all if they hadn’t, and would in fact consider it very irresponsible (and frankly idiotic) for them to even make the claims until they had.
That’s not to say that this debate should be treated as foundational to the study of this question, exactly, but… well, as I said elsewhere:
This debate has been cited repeatedly in rationalist spaces, by people who were already quite engaged with the topic, familiar with the evidence, and in possession of carefully-formed views, as having been extremely valuable and informative, and having shifted their position significantly.”
I think that makes familiarising yourself with those arguments (whether from the debate or another equivalent-or-better source) a prerequisite for making the kind of strong, confident claims Roko is making. At the moment, he’s making those claims without the information necessary to be anywhere near as confident as he is.
A foundational text in some academic field might take 17 hours to read, but you would still expect someone to have read it before making a priori wild claims that contradicted the expert consensus of that field very radically.
There’s a good reason why the foundational text in an academic field would be a text and not a video. Evaluating arguments is easier to do when they are done via text.
I think that makes familiarising yourself with those arguments (whether from the debate or another equivalent-or-better source)
I don’t think anyone has shown that the debate contains specific arguments that Roko is unfamiliar with.
Evaluating arguments is easier to do when they are done via text.
Isn’t there a transcript? In any case, this seems to be highly subjective, and in my opinion not hugely relevant anyway. To extend the analogy, your expectation of someone’s having read foundational texts before making strong claims would hardly be lessened by the objection that the texts were hard to read.
I don’t think anyone has shown that the debate contains specific arguments that Roko is unfamiliar with.
Do we need to positively show that? As I mentioned, many intelligent, thoughtful people who were already very familiar with this question and its relevant facts updated significantly based on the debate. And Roko certainly hasn’t explicitly addressed all of the arguments therein. Isn’t that enough to suggest that he should at least watch it?
It’s equivalent to watching a season of a TV show- is that really such an onerous requirement for making incredibly strong, potentially libellous claims about a contentious issue with serious real-world ramifications?
If you watch a debate the way you would a TV show where you aren’t critically evaluating everything, that’s not a good basis for forming beliefs about the real world.
Youtube videos tend to encourage you to consume them in that way, but that doesn’t make it a good epistemic practice and that’s part of the reason why scientific debates usually happen in text.
Yep, the tweet thread is just me jotting down thoughts etc while watching the debate.
I was 75-80% convinced when I tweeted that, which was before I had finished the debate. After watching the debate, I made a sketchy Bayesian calculation that got me to 96%, but I’ve since backed off to maybe 66%.
Basically: the key question for me is whether you think one of the first outbreaks of COVID happened at the Huanan Seafood Market. Rootclaim conceded this, and as far as I can tell if this is true then it’s dispositive evidence, but I have since began to doubt it.
Sure, my post doesn’t rebut Roko’s. It isn’t an arguement, after all. It is a recommendation for some content.
Yep, I didn’t watch the whole debate. I apologize if I gave that impression. Mea culpa.
How much you update on the evidence depends on your priors, no? Daniel went from “probably lab-leak” to “probably zoonosis”, and I went from “IDK” to “quite probably lab-leak”. That is the similairity I was pointint at.
I found Daniel’s thread helpful after watching some hours of the debate, as he noticed numerous points I missed. Plus, I had watched enough that the rest of the data in the thread made sense to me. So you’re right, Daniel’s thread probably isn’t that helpful. At least, not without watching e.g. the opening arguements by rootclaim and peter miller.
I honestly think most people who hear about this debate are underestimating how much they’d enjoy watching it.
I often listen to podcasts and audiobooks while working on intellectually non-demanding tasks and playing games. Putting this debate on a second monitor instead felt like a significant step up from that. Books are too often bloated with filler as authors struggle to stretch a simple idea into 8-20 hours, and even the best podcast hosts aren’t usually willing or able to challenge their guests’ ideas with any kind of rigor. By contrast, everything in this debate felt vital and interesting, and no ideas were left unchallenged. The tactic you’ll often see in normal-length debates where one side makes too many claims for the other side to address doesn’t work in a debate this long, and the length also gives a serious advantage to rigor over dull rhetorical grandstanding- compared to something like the Intelligence Squared debates, it’s night and day.
When it was over, I badly wanted more, and spent some time looking for other recordings of extremely long debates on interesting topics- unsuccessfully, as it turned out.
So, while I wouldn’t be willing to pay anyone to watch this debate, I certainly would be willing to contribute a small amount to a fund sponsoring other debates of this type.
I don’t think someone should need to pay you thousands of dollars to engage with full arguments for and against a proposition before you claim near-certainty about it. It’s just sort of a pre-requisite for having that kind of confidence in your belief, or having it be taken seriously. Perhaps particularly when you’re not only disagreeing with the expert consensus, but calling that expertise into question because they disagree with you.
That seems to generalize to “no-one is allowed to make any claim whatsoever without consuming all of the information in the world”.
Just because someone generated a vast amount of content analysing the topic, does not mean you’re obliged to consume it before forming your opinions. Nay, I think consuming all object-level evidence should be considered entirely sufficient (which I assume was done in this case). Other people’s analyses based on the same data are basically superfluous, then.
Even less than that, it seems reasonable to stop gathering evidence the moment you don’t expect any additional information to overturn the conclusions you’ve formed (as long as you’re justified in that expectation, i. e. if you have a model of the domain strong enough to have an idea regarding what sort of additional (counter)evidence may turn up and how you’d update on it).
That seems to generalize to “no-one is allowed to make any claim whatsoever without consuming all of the information in the world”.
I would say that it generalises to ‘one shouldn’t make a confident proclamation of near-certainty without consuming what seems to be very relevant information to the truth of the claim’. Which I would agree with.
I think what is missing here is that this debate has been cited repeatedly in rationalist spaces, by people who were already quite engaged with the topic, familiar with the evidence, and in possession of carefully-formed views, as having been extremely valuable and informative, and having shifted their position significantly. I think it’s reasonable to expect someone to consume that information before claiming near-certainty on the question.
I think what is missing here is that this debate has been cited repeatedly in rationalist spaces, by people who were already quite engaged with the topic, familiar with the evidence, and in possession of carefully-formed views, as having been extremely valuable and informative, and having shifted their position significantly.
I’m not sure who you’re referring to and can’t think of examples, but in case it’s me, I wasn’t already very engaged with the topic or in possession of carefully-formed views.
I think what is missing here is that this debate has been cited repeatedly in rationalist spaces, by people who were already quite engaged with the topic, familiar with the evidence, and in possession of carefully-formed views, as having been extremely valuable and informative, and having shifted their position significantly. I think it’s reasonable to expect someone to consume that information before claiming near-certainty on the question.
The arguments there seem like they have to be worth at least familiarising yourself with and considering before you claim as high a confidence as you are claiming (especially given that most people seem to have been swayed in the opposite direction to your claim).
In other words: yes, you have to select a finite subset to engage with, and I think there is good reason to include this debate within that subset.
For the claim that people generally seem to have updated towards zoonotic origin as a result of the debate? No formal evidence, of course, but do you spend much time on LW/ACX/other rationalist internet spaces? It seems an unavoidable conclusion, if a difficult one to produce evidence of.
Only the other day there was a significant debate on /r/ssc about whether the emphatic win for the zoonotic side meant that we were logically compelled to update in that direction, due to conservation of evidence (I argued against that proposition, but I seemed to be in the minority).
It’s not 1 in 100, it’s 1 in 4000.
I do not particularly want to dismiss Miller and Rootclaim’s arguments. They have just made it very difficult to see their arguments by burying them in a 17-hour long debate series.
My hourly rate is $200. I will accept a donation of $5000 to sit down and watch the entire Miller/Rootclaim debate and write a 2000 word piece describing how I updated on it and why, feel free to message me if you want to go ahead and fund this.
Alternatively, once it has been judged I’m sure someone will write it up and I can read that and potentially change my mind.
I’m not dismissing the complicated arguments. I’m dismissing a specific highly obfuscated bundle of data unless you pay me to un-obfuscate it or someone else does. I have addressed (some of, but not all) the complicated arguments in the post
I think it’s less your obligation to weed through a 17 hour debate than it is Algon’s obligation, who implies he watched the debate, to list here the arguments that convinced him that the lab-leak hypothesis is false.
I think it is Roko’s obligation to do a better job of researching and addressing counter-arguments before making a post like this one. It contains absolutely nowhere near sufficient justification for the accusations it is leveling.
So, from my perspective there are two different issues, one epistemic, and the one game-theoretic.
From the epistemic perspective, I would like to know (as part of a general interest in truth) what the true source of the pandemic was.
From the game-theoretic perspective, I think we have sufficiently convincing evidence that someone attempted to cover up the possibility that they were the source of the pandemic. (I think Roko’s post doesn’t include as much evidence as it could: he points to the Lancet article but not the part of it that’s calling lab leak a conspiracy theory, he doesn’t point to the released email discussions, etc.) I think the right strategy is to assume guilt in the presence of a coverup, because then someone who is genuinely uncertain as to whether or not they caused the issue is incentivized to cooperate with investigations instead of obstruct them.
That is, even if further investigation shows that COVID did not originate from WIV, I still think it’s a colossal crime to have dismissed the possibility of a lab leak and have fudged the evidence (or, at the very least, conflicted the investigations).
I think it’s also pretty obvious that the social consensus is against lab leak not because all the experts have watched the 17 hour rootclaim debate, but because it was manufactured, which makes me pretty unsympathetic to the “researching and addressing counter-arguments” claim; it reminds me of the courtier’s reply.
What the social consensus is and why it exists are not relevant to the point I was making. This post is accusing specific individuals of mass murder, claiming they are responsible for millions of deaths. If you just want to say that you don’t believe the expert consensus, that’s one thing, but that just leaves you in a state of uncertainty. This post expresses a tremendous amount of certainty, and the mere fact that debate was stifled cannot possibly demonstrate that the stifled side is actually correct.
I think it’s plausible—perhaps even likely—that the FBI, Secret Service, and various other agencies may have messed up the investigation in to the JFK assassination as well as acted or even colluded with each other to hide their own incompetence at protecting the president and during the aforementioned initial investigation. But this doesn’t mean they were the ones who assassinated him!
There is a large amount of material that is publicly available to be analyzed that might weigh on the question of Covid’s origins, as well as many arguments one could make. The Rootclaim debate covers much of it, but I’m sure not all. These data could be evaluated. Roko has not done that; the arguments and evidence here and in their other threads is extremely weak compared to the level of confidence that is expressed, or the level of confidence that would be required to level these accusations. Roko has clearly spent a lot of time making this post, his other 2 posts, various comments, and obnoxious comments on the Manifold thread about who would win the rootclaim debate, and has apparently done at least some research to support his claims. But when it’s pointed out that his grasp of the facts is lacking, his response is to say “pay me $200 an hour.” This is such obviously motivated reasoning that it is frankly an embarrassment for this post to have over 200 net upvotes.
This might have strategic usefulness, but that doesn’t mean it’s accurate. There are reasons why this video exists, one of which is because people don’t always behave rationally in situations like this.
It was terrible, and likely backfired, but that isn’t “the crime of the century” being referenced, that would be the millions of dead people.
Agreed on the second half, and disagreed on the first. Looking at the version history, the first version of this post clearly identifies its core claims as Roko’s beliefs and as the lab as being the “likely” origin, and those sections seem unchanged to today. I don’t think that counts as tremendous certainty. Later, Roko estimates the difference in likelihoods between two hypotheses as being 1000:1, but this is really not a tremendous amount either.
What do you wish he had said instead of what he actually said?
As I clarify in a comment elsewhere, I think we should treat them as being roughly equally terrible. If we would execute someone for accidentally killing millions of people, I think we should also execute them for destroying evidence that they accidentally killed millions of people, even if it turns out they didn’t do it.
My weak guess is Roko is operating under a similar strategy and not being clear enough on the distinction the two halves of “they likely did it and definitely covered it up”. Like, the post title begins with “Brute Force Manufactured Consensus”, which he feels strongly about in this case because of the size of the underlying problem, but I think it’s also pretty clear he is highly opposed to the methodology.
“Brute Force Manufactured consensus is hiding the Crime of the Century (emphasis mine). Although the post contains the statement “I believe” it doesn’t really express any other reservations, qualifiers, or uncertainty. It doesn’t present or consider any evidence for the alternatives.
It certainly seems like it’s supposed to a lot:
If it’s not a lot of evidence, then taking this post at face value, what would one conclude is the probability that covid came from a lab? edit: And if it’s not a lot of evidence, is it ok to accuse someone of mass murder with that amount of evidence?
Well I think this is pretty wild, but that’s beside the point, as this isn’t what the post actually says:
It would also be very strange for the post to have a bunch of content which is clearly supposed to be evidence that Covid was, in fact, a lab leak, and not just evidence that Peter Daszak tried to bury evidence if the point is simply that hiding evidence is bad.
So, in the current version of the post (which is edited from the original) Roko goes thru the basic estimate of “probability of this type of virus, location, and timing” given spillover and lab leak, and discounts other evidence in this paragraph:
I don’t think that counts as presenting it, but I do think that counts as considering it. I think it’s fine to question whether or not the arguments are robust to those details—I think they generally are and have not been impressed by any particular argument in favor of zoonosis that I’ve seen, mostly because I don’t think they properly estimate the probability under both hypotheses[1]--but I don’t think it’s the case that Roko is clearly making procedural errors here. [It seems to me like you’re arguing he’s making procedural errors instead of just combing to the wrong conclusion / using the wrong numbers, and so I’m focusing on that as the more important point.]
This is what numbers are for. Is “1000-1” a lot? Is it tremendous? Who cares about fuzzy words when the number 1000 is right there. (I happen to think 1000-1 is a lot but is not tremendous.)
For example, the spatial clustering analysis suggests that the first major transmission event was at the market. But does their model explicitly consider both “transfer from animal to many humans at the market” and “transfer from infected lab worker to many humans at the market” and estimate probabilities for both? I don’t think so, and I think that means it’s not yet in a state where it can be plugged into the full Bayesian analysis. I think you need to multiply the probability that it was from the lab times the first lab-worker superspreader event happening at the market and compare that to the probability that it was from an animal times the first animal-human superspreader event happening at the market, and then you actually have some useful numbers to compare.
I would describe that as dismissing counter-evidence out of hand; it’s trivially easy to answer the question as stated, even if you don’t believe that particular story. In any event, this seems like arguing over semantics. I think that accusing someone of a being responsible for several million deaths requires quite strong evidence, and that a pretty key component of presenting strong evidence is seriously addressing counter-arguments and counter-evidence. None of Roko’s posts do that.
Sure. For example, he’s making the exact procedural error you describe in your footnote, by failing to consider how likely the genetic evidence is under the lab leak hypothesis, or if any other cities would look suspicious as the starting location of a pandemic, etc. He’s failing to apply consistent levels of skepticism to sources. But the biggest issue, in my mind, is still just not giving the question the level of consideration it requires. (I’m drafting an actual post so more detailed object-level arguments can go there when I’m done).
I’m not sure what the point of arguing about the definition of “tremendous” is. If I had written “a lot” instead of “a tremendous amount” would anything substantial change?
There are two ways I can read this. The first is that when we catch people covering up evidence that points to them committing a crime, we should assume that they’re guilty of the underlying crime. That seems pretty bad because it’s not necessarily true (altho the coverup is some evidence for it). The second is that you should assume they’re guilty of the crime of covering up relevant info, and treat them as such. That does sound right, but it doesn’t justify you in talking about the underlying crime as if you know who’s guilty of it.
I agree that the virology and epidemiology communities didn’t watch the rootclaim debate, but I feel like this is jumping to the conclusion that they’re gullible, rather than that they’re just familiar with a bunch of data and are integrating it sensibly. The main thing that plays against it is low familiarity with the DEFUSE proposal in the GCRI survey, but I think that’s plausibly explained by people not having read the whole thing (it’s really long!).
I mean a third way, which is that covering up or destroying evidence of X should have a penalty of roughly the same severity as X. (Like, you shouldn’t assume they covered it up, you should require evidence that they covered it up.)
I think you’re pushing my statement further than it goes. Not everyone in a group has to be gullible for the social consensus of the group to be driven by gullibility, and manufactured consensus itself doesn’t require gullibility. (My guess is that more people are complicit than gullible, and more people are refusing-to-acknowledge ego-harmful possibilities than clear-mindedly setting out to deceive the public.)
To elaborate on my “courtier’s reply” comment, and maybe shine some light on ‘gullibility’, it seems to me like most religions maintain motive force thru manufactured consensus. I think if someone points that out—”our prior should be that this religion is false and propped up by motivated cognition and dysfunctional epistemic social dynamics”—and someone else replies with “ah, but you haven’t engaged with all of the theological work done by thinkers about that religion”, I think the second reply does not engage with the question of what our prior should be. I think we should assume religions are false by default, while being open to evidence.
I think similarly the naive case is that lab leak is substantially more likely than zoonosis, but not so overwhelmingly that there couldn’t be enough evidence to swing things back in favor of zoonosis. If that was the way the social epistemology had gone—people thought it was the lab, there was a real investigation and the lab was cleared—then I would basically believe the consensus and think the underlying process was valid.
I’m open to sponsorship to do further research at $200/hr. DM me if you’re interested.
This is the kind of thing you do before you make a big post accusing someone of “the crime of the century.” I don’t know how you even thought this was remotely reasonable. This is basically just Pascal’s mugging, except that the worst you can do is harm the reputation of the community… “pay me or I might make really bad posts.”
I mean I am responsible for my own thoughts. If I am wrong it is my fault.
well your shapley value on your own thoughts is certainly the highest, but others’ input isn’t zero
I read summaries and watched some of the debate, because I too am lazy. That’s why I linked to Daniel Filan’s thread on the debate. Also, Peter and Rootclaim are working on a condensed version of the three debates, which should be couple hours long.
I tried to look at Daniel Filan’s tweets. The roughly 240 posts long megathread is a largely unstructed stream of consciousness that appears hard to read. He doesn’t seem to make direct arguments so much as it is a scratchpad for thoughts and questions that occured to the author while listening to the debate. The mere act of pointing to such a borderline unreadable thread IMHO doesn’t itself constitute a significant counterargument, nor does the act of referring to the prospect of a future summary article. Reasonable norms of good debate suggest relevant counterarguments should be proportional in length and readability to the original argument, which in this case is Rokos compact nine-minute post.
Again, imagine me making a case for or against AI risk by pointing to a 17-hour YouTube debate and to an overly long and convoluted Twitter thread of the thoughts of some guy who listened to the debate. I think few would take me seriously.
I also note that you originally seemed to suggest you watched the debate in whole, while you now sound as if you watched only parts of it and read Daniel Filan’s thread. If this alone really got you “from about 70% likelihood of a lab-leak to about 1-5%”, then I think it should be easy for you to post an object-level counterargument to Roko’s post.
(Apart from that, Daniel Filan himself says he is 75-80% convinced of the zoonosis hypothesis, in contrast to your 95-99%, while also noting that this estimate doesn’t even include considerations about genetic evidence which he apparently expects to favor the lab-leak hypothesis. He also says: “Oh also this is influenced by the zoonosis guy being more impressive, which may or may not be a bias.” Though pointing to other people’s credences doesn’t provide a significant argument for anything unless there is also evidence this individual is unusually reliable at making such judgements.)
> Reasonable norms of good debate suggest relevant counterarguments should be proportional in length and readability to the original argument, which in this case is Rokos compact nine-minute post.
This seems entirely *un*reasonable to me. Some arguments simply can’t be properly made that concisely, and this principle seems to bias us towards finding snappy, simplistic explanations rather than true ones.
Someone else mentioned ‘The Pyramid and the Garden’, but I’m reminded of the sort of related argument about Atlantis in https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/ : sometimes, boring reality and ‘it’s actually just a series of coincidences’ requires a lot more explaining than a neat little conspiracy theory. Not to tar the lab leak hypothesis by calling it a conspiracy theory- while of course it literally is one, it doesn’t deserve to be demeaned by the term’s modern connotation of zany insane-person nonsense- but it is easy to see why ‘these facts seems unlikely to be a coincidence’ might be easier to argue concisely than its rebuttal, and a norm where the person that can state their argument more persuasively in shortform wins doesn’t seem like one that’s going to promote optimal truth-seeking.
The problem with “lab-leak is unlikely, look at this 17-hour debate” is that it is too short an argument, not a too long one. Arguments don’t get substituted by merely referring to them. The expression “the Riemann hypothesis” is not synonymous with the Riemann hypothesis. The former just refers to the latter. You can understand one without understanding the other.
On average, every argument gets more indirect the less accessible it is, and inaccessibility is strongly dependent on length, as well as language, intelligibility, format etc.
It may be that the 17-hour debate cannot be summarized adequately (depending on some standard of adequacy) in a nine-minute post, but a nine-minute post would be much more adequate than “lab-leak is unlikely, look at this 17-hour debate”.
It isn’t an argument, it’s a citation.
I don’t think a 17 hour debate is “inaccessible” to someone who is invested in this issue and making extremely strong, potentially very seriously libellous claims without having investigated some of the central arguments on the question at hand.
A foundational text in some academic field might take 17 hours to read, but you would still expect someone to have read it before making a priori wild claims that contradicted the expert consensus of that field very radically. I don’t think you’d take that person seriously at all if they hadn’t, and would in fact consider it very irresponsible (and frankly idiotic) for them to even make the claims until they had.
That’s not to say that this debate should be treated as foundational to the study of this question, exactly, but… well, as I said elsewhere:
I think that makes familiarising yourself with those arguments (whether from the debate or another equivalent-or-better source) a prerequisite for making the kind of strong, confident claims Roko is making. At the moment, he’s making those claims without the information necessary to be anywhere near as confident as he is.
There’s a good reason why the foundational text in an academic field would be a text and not a video. Evaluating arguments is easier to do when they are done via text.
I don’t think anyone has shown that the debate contains specific arguments that Roko is unfamiliar with.
See: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZdNyKE5yC4YjXGzfG/a-back-of-the-envelope-calculation-on-how-unlikely-the?commentId=cWCMuMpMQ98gqRB2G
Which to me strongly suggest Roko was unfamiliar with multiple (imo) strong evidence for the zoonosis origin.
Isn’t there a transcript? In any case, this seems to be highly subjective, and in my opinion not hugely relevant anyway. To extend the analogy, your expectation of someone’s having read foundational texts before making strong claims would hardly be lessened by the objection that the texts were hard to read.
Do we need to positively show that? As I mentioned, many intelligent, thoughtful people who were already very familiar with this question and its relevant facts updated significantly based on the debate. And Roko certainly hasn’t explicitly addressed all of the arguments therein. Isn’t that enough to suggest that he should at least watch it?
It’s equivalent to watching a season of a TV show- is that really such an onerous requirement for making incredibly strong, potentially libellous claims about a contentious issue with serious real-world ramifications?
No transcript, but the judges have documents where they outline their reasoning:
Will van Treuren’s doc
Eric Stansifer’s doc
If you watch a debate the way you would a TV show where you aren’t critically evaluating everything, that’s not a good basis for forming beliefs about the real world.
Youtube videos tend to encourage you to consume them in that way, but that doesn’t make it a good epistemic practice and that’s part of the reason why scientific debates usually happen in text.
I watch TV in a pretty focused way where I take things in.
But I wasn’t suggesting you watch it like a TV show; just that’s a similar time commitment (ie not an unreasonable one).
Notes:
Yep, the tweet thread is just me jotting down thoughts etc while watching the debate.
I was 75-80% convinced when I tweeted that, which was before I had finished the debate. After watching the debate, I made a sketchy Bayesian calculation that got me to 96%, but I’ve since backed off to maybe 66%.
Basically: the key question for me is whether you think one of the first outbreaks of COVID happened at the Huanan Seafood Market. Rootclaim conceded this, and as far as I can tell if this is true then it’s dispositive evidence, but I have since began to doubt it.
One thing in favour of my judgements is that I’m at number 5 on Metaculus’ leaderboard of how accurate predictors were compared to their peers, altho that mostly comes from predictions made between 2016 and April 2020, when I burnt out from forecasting on Metaculus.
I’m currently in the Diamond league on Manifold, which is much less impressive, and in part driven by my prediction of which way the debate would go.
Oh—it could be that my peer score is artificially high due to using Metaculus back when there were fewer peers who were good at forecasting.
Sure, my post doesn’t rebut Roko’s. It isn’t an arguement, after all. It is a recommendation for some content.
Yep, I didn’t watch the whole debate. I apologize if I gave that impression. Mea culpa.
How much you update on the evidence depends on your priors, no? Daniel went from “probably lab-leak” to “probably zoonosis”, and I went from “IDK” to “quite probably lab-leak”. That is the similairity I was pointint at.
I found Daniel’s thread helpful after watching some hours of the debate, as he noticed numerous points I missed. Plus, I had watched enough that the rest of the data in the thread made sense to me. So you’re right, Daniel’s thread probably isn’t that helpful. At least, not without watching e.g. the opening arguements by rootclaim and peter miller.
I honestly think most people who hear about this debate are underestimating how much they’d enjoy watching it.
I often listen to podcasts and audiobooks while working on intellectually non-demanding tasks and playing games. Putting this debate on a second monitor instead felt like a significant step up from that. Books are too often bloated with filler as authors struggle to stretch a simple idea into 8-20 hours, and even the best podcast hosts aren’t usually willing or able to challenge their guests’ ideas with any kind of rigor. By contrast, everything in this debate felt vital and interesting, and no ideas were left unchallenged. The tactic you’ll often see in normal-length debates where one side makes too many claims for the other side to address doesn’t work in a debate this long, and the length also gives a serious advantage to rigor over dull rhetorical grandstanding- compared to something like the Intelligence Squared debates, it’s night and day.
When it was over, I badly wanted more, and spent some time looking for other recordings of extremely long debates on interesting topics- unsuccessfully, as it turned out.
So, while I wouldn’t be willing to pay anyone to watch this debate, I certainly would be willing to contribute a small amount to a fund sponsoring other debates of this type.
I don’t think someone should need to pay you thousands of dollars to engage with full arguments for and against a proposition before you claim near-certainty about it. It’s just sort of a pre-requisite for having that kind of confidence in your belief, or having it be taken seriously. Perhaps particularly when you’re not only disagreeing with the expert consensus, but calling that expertise into question because they disagree with you.
That seems to generalize to “no-one is allowed to make any claim whatsoever without consuming all of the information in the world”.
Just because someone generated a vast amount of content analysing the topic, does not mean you’re obliged to consume it before forming your opinions. Nay, I think consuming all object-level evidence should be considered entirely sufficient (which I assume was done in this case). Other people’s analyses based on the same data are basically superfluous, then.
Even less than that, it seems reasonable to stop gathering evidence the moment you don’t expect any additional information to overturn the conclusions you’ve formed (as long as you’re justified in that expectation, i. e. if you have a model of the domain strong enough to have an idea regarding what sort of additional (counter)evidence may turn up and how you’d update on it).
I would say that it generalises to ‘one shouldn’t make a confident proclamation of near-certainty without consuming what seems to be very relevant information to the truth of the claim’. Which I would agree with.
I think what is missing here is that this debate has been cited repeatedly in rationalist spaces, by people who were already quite engaged with the topic, familiar with the evidence, and in possession of carefully-formed views, as having been extremely valuable and informative, and having shifted their position significantly. I think it’s reasonable to expect someone to consume that information before claiming near-certainty on the question.
I’m not sure who you’re referring to and can’t think of examples, but in case it’s me, I wasn’t already very engaged with the topic or in possession of carefully-formed views.
Well it wouldn’t be you then, would it?
The full arguments for a proposition can be arbitrarily long. You have to select a finite subset to even engage with.
This is fair, but as I said elsewhere:
The arguments there seem like they have to be worth at least familiarising yourself with and considering before you claim as high a confidence as you are claiming (especially given that most people seem to have been swayed in the opposite direction to your claim).
In other words: yes, you have to select a finite subset to engage with, and I think there is good reason to include this debate within that subset.
What evidence do you have for that claim?
For the claim that people generally seem to have updated towards zoonotic origin as a result of the debate? No formal evidence, of course, but do you spend much time on LW/ACX/other rationalist internet spaces? It seems an unavoidable conclusion, if a difficult one to produce evidence of.
Only the other day there was a significant debate on /r/ssc about whether the emphatic win for the zoonotic side meant that we were logically compelled to update in that direction, due to conservation of evidence (I argued against that proposition, but I seemed to be in the minority).