But surely most people realize that it would be very hard for an organized child rape cabal to spread word about their offerings to customers without someone alerting police.
Epstein seemed to run something like an organized child rape cabal and most people involved in it didn’t go to prison.
The current establishment position is that it’s unethical to run randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trials for vaccines if there’s already an existing vaccine on the market that targets a given illness. Instead, new vaccines for illnesses with existing vaccines get tested against an existing vaccine. In practice, most of the commonly used childhood vaccines in the United States fall under that category.
Those are just the basic facts of the issue whether or not you like RFK Jr. The more interesting question is about whether his policy demand of requiring randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trials for each vaccine is one that should be adopted or not. And if it gets adopted what happens with existing vaccines that fail that standard.
If that’s your theory of change, how do you think that communication should work? Who could be tasked with creating the right communication so that it will work?
If a product derives from Federally-funded research, the government owns a share of the IP for that product.
How would you do that in practice? Is it a matter of adding a standard paragraph to NIH grants?
Readers from backgrounds like mine may balk at “diversity” as an explicit benefit; however, diversity is vital to properly exploring the hypothesis space without the bias imposed by limited perspectives.
There are different kinds of diversity.
It seems to me like the decision of the Ida Rolf Foundation to start funding research had good downstream effects that we see in recent advances in understanding fascia. That foundation being able to fund things that the NHI wouldn’t fund was important. Getting a knowledge community like the Rolfers included in academic researchers is diversity that produces beneficial research outcomes.
If you follow standard DEI criteria, it doesn’t help you with a task like integrating the Rolfing perspective. It doesn’t get you to fund a white man like Robert Schleip.
I would suspect that coming from a background of economic poverty means that you likely have less slack that you can use to learn about knowledge communities besides the mainstream academic community. Having the time to spent in relevant knowledge communities, seems to me like a sign of economic privilege.
Maybe, you could get something relevant by focusing on diversity of illness burden within your researcher community as people with chronic illnesses might have spent a lot of time acquiring knowledge that produces useful perspectives, but I doubt that standard DEI criteria get you there.
To the extent that our needs are “actively shoot ourselves in the foot slightly less often”, there’s the question of why we currently shoot ourselves in the food. I suspect it’s because of the incentives that are produced by the current policies.
Saying “whatever ways are reasonable” is ignoring the key issues.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believes that all vaccines should require placebo-blind trials to be licensed the most other drugs do.
Whether or not that’s reasonable is the key question.
Beyond that, a major health problem is obesity and here semaglutide seems like it would help a lot.
Do you believe that Medicaid/Medicare should just pay the sticker price for everyone who wants it?
Surely the state of the science has advanced since this lawsuit took place.
Yes, it does. We now have meta reviews which were not common back in 1990.
Cochrane is one of the best sources for metastudies and their read of the scientific evidence for chiropractics is: “The review shows that while combined chiropractic interventions slightly improved pain and disability in the short term and pain in the medium term for acute and subacute low-back pain, there is currently no evidence to support or refute that combined chiropractic interventions provide a clinically meaningful advantage over other treatments for pain or disability in people with low-back pain.”
While it’s not shown to be superior to conventional treatment it’s also not shown to be without effect. Given that insurance covers a variety of treatments for back pain that are just as effective as chiropractics, the AMA has been essentially shown wrong.
To me, it’s quite strange to advocate “Don’t Dismiss on Epistemics” while at the same time ignoring scientific meta reviews on the topic.
I simply find it interesting that people feel the need to justify their terminal goals (unless they are emotions), and that the only way they can seem to do it is by associating it with an emotion.
I don’t find it surprising that when you ask people “Why do you want that?”, they feel pressure to justify themselves. That seems to me the basic way normal human beings reject to social inquiries. If you ask “Why X” normal people feel pressured to provide a justification.
Yes, most people are generally bad at updating. That has nothing to do with whether or not someone is a libertarian.
The reason Zvi is surprised comes downstream of numerical literacy and not downstream of him being libertarian-leaning.
28% percent increase suggests that more than one in five go bankrupt because of sports online gambling (which would be a subset of gambling in general).
If I ask Claude for the top five reasons people go bankrupt in the US in 2023 I get:
1. Medical Debt
2. Job Loss/Income Reduction
3. Credit Card/Consumer Debt
4. Divorce/Family Issues
5. Housing Market Issues/Mortgage Debt
ChatGPT gives me:
Loss of Income
Medical Expenses
Unaffordable Mortgages or Foreclosures
Overspending and Credit Card Debt
Providing Financial Assistance to Others
I think Claude and ChatGPT do summarize the common wisdom about what normal people believe about what the most important factors for bankruptcy happen to be and that does not include gambling (let alone sports online gambling specifically). If you ask a normal person for the top five reasons they would likely come up with a similar list that does not mention sports online betting.
Most people don’t have very fixed ideas about how much a 28% overall increase in bankruptcy happens to be.
If you would ask most people without a libertarian outlook to rank different factors that lead to an increase in bankruptcy, I would not expect them to be able to accurately compare them and find that sports online gambling only will have such a strong influence.
I would add that convincing Musk to take action against Altman is the highest ROI thing I can think of in terms of decreasing AI extinction risk.
I would expect, the issue isn’t about convincing Musk to take action but about finding effective actions that Musk could take.
The United States has laws that prevent the US intelligence and defense agencies from spying on their own population. The Snowden revelations showed us that the US intelligence and defense agencies did not abide by those limits.
Facebook has a usage policy that forbids running misinformation campaigns on their platform. That did not stop US intelligence and defense agencies from running disinformation campaigns on their platform.
Instead of just trusting contracts, Antrophics could add oversight mechanisms, so that a few Antrophics employees can look over how the models are used in practice and whether they are used within the bounds that Antrophics expects them to be used in.
If all usage of the models is classified and out of reach of checking by Antrophics employees, there’s no good reason to expect the contract to be limiting US intelligence and defense agencies if those find it important to use the models outside of how Antrophics expects them to be used.
For example, with carefully selected government entities, we may allow foreign intelligence analysis in accordance with applicable law. All other use restrictions in our Usage Policy, including those prohibiting use for disinformation campaigns, the design or use of weapons, censorship, domestic surveillance, and malicious cyber operations, remain.
This sounds to me like a very carefully worded nondenail denail.
If you say that one example of how you can break your terms is to allow a select government entity to do foreign intelligence analysis in accordance with applicable law and not do disinformation campaigns, you are not denying that another example of how you could do expectations is to allow disinformation campaigns.
If Antrophics would be sincere in this being the only expectation that’s made, it would be easy to add a promise to Exceptions to our Usage Policy, that Anthropic will publish all expectations that they make for the sake of transparency.
Don’t forget, that probably only a tiny number of Anthropic employees have seen the actual contracts and there’s a good chance that those are build by classification from talking with other Anthropics employees about what’s in the contracts.
At Antrophics you are a bunch of people who are supposed to think about AI safety and alignment in general. You could think of this as a testcase of how to design mechanisms for alignment and the Exceptions to our Usage Policy seems like a complete failure in that regard, because it neither contains mechanism to make all expectations public nor any mechanisms to make sure that the policies are followed in practice.
AlphaFold doesn’t come out of academia. That doesn’t make it non-scientific. As Feymann said in his cargo-cult science speech, plenty of academic work is not properly tested. Being peer-reviewed doesn’t make something scientific.
Conceptually, I think you are making a mistake when you treat ideas and experiments as the same and equate the probability of an experiment finding a result as the same as the idea being true. Finding a good experiment to do to test an idea is nontrivial.
A friend of mine was working in a psychology lab and according to my friend the professor leading the lab was mostly trying to p-hack her way into publishing results.
Another friend, spoke approvingly of the work of the same professor because the professor managed to get Buddhist ideas into academic psychology and now the official scientific definition of the term resembles certain Buddhist notions.
The professor has a well-respected research career in her field.
CFAR’s approach to the problem was internal double crux. If internal parts disagree and have different beliefs, internal double crux is a way to align them.
Leverage Research developed with Belief Reporting another approach to deal with the issue.
While that tweet says good things about his relationship with truth, his defense of talking about immigrants eating cats and dogs because constituents told him without checking whether or not that’s true was awful.
Maybe, we felt like he needed to do it because of political pressure and felt dirty doing it, but it was still awful by rationalist standards.
I think there’s a good chance that JDVance is better than the average US politician, but there’s no good reason to see him as a rationalist.
Why would you trust CSIS here? A US think tank like that is going to seek to publically say that invading Taiwan is bad for the Chinese.
Given that the Supreme Court upheld the Voting Rights Act of 1965, state legislatures aren’t able to do just whatever they want without limits.
What those limits would be in a particular case, is something you will only find out when had a few legal battles.
How do you tell that there were sharper back then?