How is death one of the least bad options? Can you expand on that?
frankybegs
Karma: 198
Apologies, I just read your reply to Joseph C.
I would like to request the information, your reservations notwithstanding. I am happy to sign a liability waiver, or anything of that nature that would make you feel comfortable. I am also happy to share as much data as it is feasible to collect, and believe I could recruit at least some controls. As I mention above, I don’t think I’ll be able to implement the intervention in its entirety, given practical and resource constraints, but given your stated interest in a ’1000 ships’ approach this seems like it could be a positive for you.
Sorry if I’ve missed something about this elsewhere, but is it possible to explain what it involves to people who aren’t going to properly do it?
I don’t have 4+ hours a day to spare at the moment, nor $10k, but I’d love to know what the intervention involves so I can adopt as much of it as it is feasible to do (given it sounds like a multi-pronged intervention). Unless there’s reason to think it only works as an all-or-nothing? Even just the supplements on their own sounds like they might be worth trying, otherwise.
Well it wouldn’t be you then, would it?
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).
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).
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?
My source for that was Wikipedia, which in turn cites this article in the South China Morning Post:
Having now actually read the article, I didn’t see the claim that it was the largest, so that may actually be made up.
But the article does make it clear that there was much more than seafood, with all sorts of animals including foxes, wolf cubs, snakes, hedgehogs, rats, frogs and palm civets.
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.
How can an article be transphobic? How is it transphobic to argue that ‘transgender ideology has contradictory premises’? I don’t particularly think that it does, but that’s a statement about an ideology- not about any person or group of persons.
This is fair, but as I said elsewhere:
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.
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.
Isn’t the fact that it’s the largest wet market in central China relevant here? Surely that greatly increases the chance of it travelling to Wuhan specifically in a zoonotic origin scenario, because animals are brought there from all around.
Your post appears to, by repeatedly emphasising the distance in the context of arguing that a zoonotic origin is unlikely.
What makes you think they could get the death penalty? In what jurisdiction, and consequent to what conviction? It doesn’t seem likely that they would be convicted of murder if they were doing what was at the time considered normal science, surely, and while I suppose they could get a manslaughter or equivalent conviction via negligence, that wouldn’t ever carry a sentence so severe.
> 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.
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.
Wonderful writing! It’s rare to see something written so beautifully without sacrificing rigour; often aesthetic and rigorous writing seem like different ends of a spectrum.
I’m not so sure you managed to avoid “major spoilers” for Grizzly Man, but nice subtle reference to the AI in woman’s clothing film; got the point across while preserving the surprise for anyone who hasn’t seen it. A fantastic film, and probably a major reason I’m more intuitively receptive to the concept of AI risk than most.
Just to maximally clarify, I didn’t mean to suggest that the offer was itself inherently combative.
If the the benefits persisted for two years after ceasing to take the iron, doesn’t that suggest that iron wasn’t actually the causal factor? Or am I missing something here?