DirectedEvolution

Karma: 11,596

Pandemic Prediction Checklist: H5N1

Pandemic Prediction Checklist: Monkeypox

Correlation may imply some sort of causal link.

For guessing its direction, simple models help you think.

Controlled experiments, if they are well beyond the brink

Of .05 significance will make your unknowns shrink.

Replications show there’s something new under the sun.

Did one cause the other? Did the other cause the one?

Are they both controlled by what has already begun?

Or was it their coincidence that caused it to be done?

DirectedEvolution 24 Jul 2025 3:23 UTC
23 points
12
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
Every hobby will be publicly represented by its members who are least deterred by an uninterested audience.
I’d distinguish between oversampling the annoying members of a class (yes), and a class being publicly represented by its most annoying members (not necessarily). A class that’s non-evangelical, that actively strategizes on how to control its evangelizers so that they’ll be less annoying, or that has a limited moral component, will tend not to establish an annoying public image.
Consider Mormons. They’re intensely moral, highly evangelical, but they have established a careful approach to evangelicism that lets them do an enormous amount of it while having their public image of evangelicism be nothing worse than a couple formally dressed young men politely knocking on your door.
Jews are also moral, but they do not attempt to convert non-Jews. What Jews often find intensely annoying (to say the least) about other Jews is when more conservative Jews tell typically less conservative Jews that they’re “not really Jewish” (i.e. because they don’t have an unbroken maternal chain of Jewish ancestry, even if they have been going to synagogue their entire life, etc).
Gardeners are another example. Gardening doesn’t have much of a moral or evangelical component in general, although gardeners often enjoy sharing their hobby with each other. Gardening has a highly pro-social, non-annoying public image.
EAs and rationalists are extraordinarily, and to my mind, inexplicably annoying to adjacent communities (i.e. people hate rationalists on Hacker News for some reason). EA and rationalism certainly have an intense moral component. Both are fairly evangelical. And it seems like the movements exert not much control over their members, or are not capable of giving them guidance, on how to be non-annoying in their evangelicism. Plenty of rationalists and EAs are highly annoying to other rationalists and EAs as well. The ratio of extremely bad actors to participants is highly unfavorable. Neither movement has much of a mechanism or norm for enforcing non-annoyingness on its membership.
Overall, I actually think there’s quite a bit of variance in how annoying specific identity groups are, both amongst themselves and in their interactions with the wider world. It seems like an important thing to understand better for those who would like to make improvements in the status quo.

DirectedEvolution 23 Jul 2025 21:23 UTC
2 points
−2
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Formative vs. summative evaluations
“For one thing, I do not advocate, and have never advocated, a policy of having zero guardrails.”
I’m glad to hear you are comfortable with at least some guardrails. But you did specifically say “it’s so important to have discussion in the comments to a post be as unconstrained as possible.”
“As constrained as possible” means “no guardrails.” If you meant something different, you should have said what you meant, or at least acknowledged that you made a mistake.

DirectedEvolution 23 Jul 2025 19:20 UTC
2 points
−2
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Formative vs. summative evaluations
Responding to criticism of any kind is costly in time and emotional energy. Criticism may feel unpleasant to the recipient, or turn out to be incorrect or unimportant, and that’s OK to a certain extent. We need to tolerate a certain amount of net-negative criticism so that people feel like they can afford to make occasional mistakes when attempting to deliver constructive criticism. When an individual delivers a large amount of net-negative criticism (i.e. a mix of incorrect, unpelasant, and time consuming) over an extended period of time, then that eventually becomes a problem.
Constraints on discussion are typically implicit guardrails that most people respect that makes participating in the conversation, project, or community sustainable for most of its members. Those guardrails are sometimes self-imposed (i.e. individuals weighing the consequences of saying vs. not saying X) and sometimes externally enforced (i.e. criticizing the critic, or criticizing the community for having the wrong approach to tolerating criticism).
My argument is that it would be a very bad idea to optimize for the fewest possible guardrails against people’s ability to criticize, and that this seems to be what you’re advocating for in the space of online discourse, at least on LessWrong (“it’s so important to have discussion in the comments to a post be as unconstrained as possible”). A policy of zero guardrails allows conversations to be routinely derailed by Gish gallops, and I claim this not only can happen, but that it’s common knowledge that this happens consistently. There are a number of strategies communities can use to impose guardrails that mitigate this problem, all of which do have substantial costs that those communities appear largely willing to bear because of the much higher cost of allowing Gish gallops to destroy spaces for meaningful discourse.
In certain situations, like Soviet Russia, brutal enforcement of excessive guardrails against true and important criticism can become a much bigger problem than the sort of Gish gallops that degrade online discourse and that we are discussing here. But I regard that as so different from the problem that we’re discussing here that it’s a red herring and I’m not interested in further discussing comparisons between guardrails in online discourse and anti-speech enforcement in totalitarian regimes.

DirectedEvolution 23 Jul 2025 18:29 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Formative vs. summative evaluations
I don’t have a comprehensive definition of constructive criticism—I know it when I see it. Presenting solutions is not necessary for constructive criticism.
To take a stab at defining it, constructive criticism is about optimizing the alignment between proposed methods and true goals given the resources available. Non-constructive criticism may be actively worsening the alignment, but it could also just be inefficient. The risk of inefficiency is the issue I’ve been pointing out above.

DirectedEvolution 23 Jul 2025 18:24 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Formative vs. summative evaluations
I don’t perceive you as having understood what I was saying, or as having addressed my central points.

DirectedEvolution 23 Jul 2025 16:59 UTC
0 points
−2
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Formative vs. summative evaluations
To lay cards on the table, what are you trying to accomplish with this back and forth with me? I’m trying to find common ground and make some important distinctions, but it seems to me like you’re trying to vent or cut off the discussion. Is that what you’re trying to do?

DirectedEvolution 23 Jul 2025 16:49 UTC
0 points
−2
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Formative vs. summative evaluations
In my experience, this is a euphemism for “ensuring that high-status people retain their high status, and that (high-status) conflict-averse people don’t have to deal with real disagreements” approximately 99% of the time.
That’s because this principle is so obvious that it typically goes without saying. Speaking such phrases aloud can indeed serve as a form of rhetoric to defend status hierarchies. Yet when one person is deploying non-constructive criticism, high-status people have the most clout to push back. If their high status genuinely depends on bona fide healthy working relationships and productive conversations, then they’ll be extra motivated to deliver this pushback.
In summary:
- The fact that these phrases can also serve as rhetoric to defend status hierarchies is not a particularly strong argument against the ideas they express.
- Status hierarchies often depend on productive conversations and healthy working relationships, so it’s no surprise that defending one is entangled with defending the other.

A brief perspective from an IMO coordinator

DirectedEvolution23 Jul 2025 7:19 UTC

36 points

7 comments1 min readLW link

(www.reddit.com)

DirectedEvolution 23 Jul 2025 5:35 UTC
12 points
8
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Formative vs. summative evaluations
Unconstrained discussion is not necessarily conducive to robust formative evaluation. Not all criticism is constructive. In fact, criticism can derail discussions by exhausting and demoralizing one’s conversation partner, or by wasting time on noncentral issues.

Steering conversation productively and in a way that reinforces healthy working relationships imposes substantial constraints on the conversation. These constraints are a good thing.

DirectedEvolution 21 Jul 2025 1:20 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: LLMs Can’t See Pixels or Characters
You haven’t shown it can’t spell that token. To anthropomorphize, the AI appears to be assuming you’ve misspelled another word. Gemini has no problem if asked.

DirectedEvolution 20 Jul 2025 16:58 UTC
10 points
4
in reply to: J Bostock’s comment on: OpenAI Claims IMO Gold Medal
He’s saying that you can compare AI to humans, but to do that to a professional research standard, you need to meet the following criteria:
- Explicit about your methodology in advance
- Specific about the comparison you are making
- Justify your interpretation of your results
OpenAI is currently not attempting to meet this standard. They are hyping their product. That is their perogative, but Tao is under no obligation to participate in the hype and he’s being clear about the conditions under which he would comment.

DirectedEvolution 15 Jul 2025 15:04 UTC
8 points
2
on: What do you Want out of Literature Reviews?
Put your most important, concrete takeaways first, in a form anyone can understand. Write with authority. Put your methods, motives, and analysis details later.

Right now, I have to read too much text to figure out what you’re claiming and why it matters, even in the summary. For example, for your gargling paper, you could have led with:

“A few tiny studies show water gargling prevents illness, but I suspect publication bias is skewing the reported results. Notably, one paper showed long-term side effects from frequent gargling. In this review, I walk through the most important results and methods from each of these studies and discuss why I think there’s a risk of publication bias. For context, I’m an independent researcher with [relevant background qualifications] and this is a personal blog post, not traditional peer-reviewed research.”

DirectedEvolution 1 Jul 2025 9:42 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: TimothyTV’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform
I think that these are genuinely hard questions to answer in a scientific way. My own speculation is that using AI to solve problems is a skill of its own, along with recognizing which problems they are currently not good for. Some use of LLMs teaches these skills, which is useful.
I think a potential failure mode for AI might be when people systematically choose to work on lower-impact problems that AI can be used to solve, rather than higher-impact problems that AI is less useful for but that can be solved in other ways. Of course, AI can also increase people’s ambitions by unlocking the ability to pursue higher-impact goals they would not have been able to otherwise achieve. Whether or not AI increases or decreases human ambition on net seems like a key question.
In my world, I see limited use of AI except as a complement to traditional internet search, a coding assistant by competent programmers, a sort of Grammarly on steroids, an OK-at-best tutor that’s cheap and always available on any topic, and a way to get meaningless paperwork done faster. These use cases all seem basically ambition-enhancing to me. That’s the reason I asked John why he’s worried about this version of AI. My experience is that once I gained some familiarity with the limitations of AI, it’s been a straightforwaredly useful tool, with none of the serious downsides I have experienced from social media and smartphones.
The issues I’ve seen seem to have to do with using AI to deepfake political policy proposals, homework, blog posts, and job applications. These are genuine and serious problems, but mainly have to do with adding a tremendous amount of noise to collective discourse rather than the self-sabotage enabled by smartphones and social media. So I’m wondering if John’s more concerned about those social issues or by some sort of self-sabotage capacity from AI that I’m not seeing. Using AI to do your homework is obviously self-sabotage, but given the context I’m assuming that’s not what John’s talking about.

DirectedEvolution 1 Jul 2025 9:27 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: lesswronguser123’s comment on: Support for bedrock liberal principles seems to be in pretty bad shape these days
Agreed. Perhaps a better test of a society’s relative liberality is to examine its worst examples of infringements of liberal views—its worst censorship, persecution of demographic groups, limits on property rights, and so on, defining these terms broadly.
I think that the tradeoff between allowing people to pursue their cultural and aesthetic agendas through legal means and preserving a basically liberal government and intercultural framework in which those agendas are pursued is an extremely difficult one to get right. It tends to produce a sense of paradox and hypocrisy. It’s also very hard to figure out when we’re facing a slippery slope into illiberalism or a non-preferred implemention of the tradeoffs inherent in liberalism.
In the context of a basically liberal society, like the USA where I live, I tend to perceive most of the flaws in liberalism as stemming from human nature rather than capture of power centers by committed illiberal ideologues. Conservatives and liberals in the USA both see themselves as basically sticking up for what we’re here referring to as “liberal” values, and I think most members of both parties, even the far left and far right, see themselves as generally presenting contrasting versions of “liberalism.” So I think we have a case here where most US citizens see their nation as less liberal than it really is, in contrast to the example you give of China, a nation where most Chinese citizens may see their nation as more liberal than it really is.

DirectedEvolution 1 Jul 2025 3:12 UTC
2 points
−2
in reply to: lesswronguser123’s comment on: Support for bedrock liberal principles seems to be in pretty bad shape these days
It sounds like what you are hoping for is to avoid illiberal backsliding by making everybody crystal-clear on what liberalism is and giving them a deep understanding of why they should support it.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s tractable. Fortunately, I don’t think it’s necessary. How successful have China and Myanmar been in convincing the world they being run on liberal principles?
My view is that most people are pretty clear on the concrete facts of life that matter for liberalism.
- Am I being persecuted for my beliefs?
- Is my life at risk due to my identity?
- Can I say what I want?
- Is my property secure, and am I free to transact?
When people debate politics, I contend they typically are debating over tradeoffs inherent in liberal ideas, or between values orthogonal to liberalism. Examples of the latter include dealing with externalities such as pollution, environmental destruction, or public aesthetics. Note that a liberal society can still care about things other than liberalism, and sometimes that will result in tradeoffs with liberalism-maximalism. Making a democratic choice for non-liberal maximalism is still a position compatible with liberalism.

DirectedEvolution 1 Jul 2025 0:01 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: TimothyTV’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform
Setting aside cheating, do you think LLMs are diminishing opportunities for thought, or redistributing them to other topics? And why?

DirectedEvolution 30 Jun 2025 18:59 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: lesswronguser123’s comment on: Support for bedrock liberal principles seems to be in pretty bad shape these days
Most of the current debates about liberalism are debates about how to trade off between competing liberal priorities. I would regard these debates about exceptions to free speech—whether any are tolerated, and which ones—as debates within a common liberal framework. Typically, proponents of each site, all of whom are taking one liberal view or another, cast their opponents as illiberal (in the theory sense, not the American “progressive-vibe” sense). Opponents reject this label because they genuinely don’t perceive themselves that way.
I think the whole debate would be better if we recognized that there are exist high-stakes tradeoffs between competing liberal priorities, and that it’s these competing visions of liberalism that are at the heart of contemporary political discourse in America.

DirectedEvolution 30 Jun 2025 5:05 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: lesswronguser123’s comment on: Support for bedrock liberal principles seems to be in pretty bad shape these days
The distinction I’m driving at is between making an in-depth intellectual argument about liberalism (which is what you and Gordon are focused on) and a winning emotional appeal (which is what I’m focused on).

My claim is that support for liberalism has been eroded by too few winning emotional appeals for it, and that they’re actually easy to make. It’s not necessary to address the ambiguities. Just share anecdotes that stir up positive feelings in the right direction.

DirectedEvolution 29 Jun 2025 22:10 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform
Why do you think LLMs are moving people backwards? With phones, it was their attention-sucking nature. What is it with LLMs?

DirectedEvolution 29 Jun 2025 21:55 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Support for bedrock liberal principles seems to be in pretty bad shape these days
Controversial ideas need to be defended bravely, clearly, and often to keep them in the Overton Window. A persistent drip of timely examples and anecdotes combined with a simple interpretation is much more effective. Ideas like “free speech” are very easy to defend in a simple way. Just pointing out that “in Britain, they just put someone on trial for calling someone a Karen” is a fine way to argue for continuing to protect free speech, without needing to get into any abstractions.

DirectedEvolution

A brief per­spec­tive from an IMO coordinator

A brief perspective from an IMO coordinator