localdeity

Karma: 2,123

localdeity 19 Sep 2024 8:49 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Michael Cohn’s comment on: Pronouns are Annoying
Using the pronoun people ask you to use has become a proxy for all sorts of other tolerant/benevolent attitudes towards that person and the way they want to live their life, and to an even greater extent, refusing to do that is a proxy for thinking they should be ignored, or possibly reviled, or possibly killed.
There’s an interesting mechanic here, a hyperstitious cascade. In certain educational environments, people are taught to use approved language with protected-class members. In that environment, anyone who uses forbidden language is, therefore, some kind of troublemaker. That then makes it somewhat less illegitimate for the most sensitive of those protected-class members to say they feel threatened when someone uses forbidden language. Which then makes it all the more important to teach people to use approved language, and have harsher enforcement on it. If this goes far enough, then we get to where one can make the case that unpunished usage of forbidden language constitutes a hostile environment, which would therefore drive out the protected classes and hence violate civil rights law.

localdeity 6 Sep 2024 20:16 UTC
9 points
0
in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: Zach Stein-Perlman’s Shortform
I would expect that some amount of good safety research is of the form, “We tried several ways of persuading several leading AI models how to give accurate instructions for breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Here are the ways that succeeded, here are some first-level workarounds, here’s how we beat those workarounds...”: in other words, stuff that would be dangerous to publish. In the most extreme cases, a mere title (“Telling the AI it’s writing a play defeats all existing safety RLHF” or “Claude + Coverity finds zero-day RCE exploits in many codebases”) could be dangerous.
That said, some large amount should be publishable, and 5 papers does seem low.
Though maybe they’re not making an effort to distinguish what’s safe to publish from what’s not, and erring towards assuming the latter? (Maybe someone set a policy of “Before publishing any safety research, you have to get Important Person X to look through it and/or go through some big process to ensure publishing it is safe”, and the individual researchers are consistently choosing “Meh, I have other work to do, I won’t bother with that” and therefore not publishing?)

localdeity 3 Sep 2024 22:40 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Nathan Helm-Burger’s comment on: Nursing doubts
Any specific knowledge about colostrum? (Mildly surprised it hasn’t been mentioned in the thread.) Do breastmilk banks usually supply that, and is it worthwhile?

localdeity 3 Sep 2024 4:13 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Jimrandomh’s Shortform Posts
The idea that ethical statements are anything more than “just expressions of emotion” is, to paraphrase Lucretius, “regarded by the common people as true, by the wise^[1] as false, and by rulers as useful.”
I figure you think the wise are correct. Well, then. Consider randomly selected paragraphs from Supreme Court justices’ opinions. Or consider someone saying “I’d like to throw this guy in jail, but unfortunately, the evidence we have is not admissible in court, and the judicial precedent on rules of evidence is there for a reason—it limits the potential abusiveness of the police, and that’s more important than occasionally letting a criminal off—so we have to let him go.” Is that an ethical statement? And is it “just an expression of emotion”?
For the record, in an ethical context, when I say a behavior is bad, I mean that (a) an ethical person shouldn’t do it (or at least should have an aversion to doing it—extreme circumstances might make it the best option) and (b) ethical people have license to punish it in some way, which, depending on the specifics, might range from “social disapproval” to “the force of the law”.
Alarming and dangerous as this view may be, I’d be really surprised if literally everyone who had power (“in charge of anything important”) also lacked the self-awareness to see it.
I think there are lots of people in power who are amoral, and this is indeed dangerous, and does indeed frequently lead to them harming people they rule over.
However, I don’t think most of them become amoral by reading emotivist philosophy or by independently coming to the conclusion that ethical statements are “just expressions of emotion”. What makes rulers frequently immoral? Some have hypothesized that there’s an evolved response to higher social status, to become more psychopathic. Some have said that being psychopathic makes people more likely to succeed at the fight to become a ruler. It’s also possible that they notice that, in their powerful position, they’re unlikely to face consequences for bad things they do, and… they either motivatedly find reasons to drop their ethical principles, or never held them in the first place.

localdeity 2 Sep 2024 23:38 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Jimrandomh’s Shortform Posts
There’s a philosophy called “emotivism” that seems to be along these lines. “Emotivism is a meta-ethical view that claims that ethical sentences do not express propositions but emotional attitudes.”
I can see a couple of ways to read it (not having looked too closely). The first is “Everyone’s ethical statements are actually just expressions of emotion. And, as we all know, emotions are frequently illogical and inappropriate to the situation. Therefore, everything anyone has ever said or will say about ethics is untrustworthy, and can reasonably be dismissed.” This strikes me as alarming, and dangerous if any adherents were in charge of anything important.
The second reading is something like, “When humans implement ethical judgments—e.g. deciding that the thief deserves punishment—we make our emotions into whatever is appropriate to carry out the actions we’ve decided upon (e.g. anger towards the thief). Emotions are an output of the final judgment, and are always a necessary component of applying the judgment. However, the entire process leading up to the final judgment isn’t necessarily emotional; we can try, and expect the best of us to usually succeed, at making that process conform to principles like logical consistency.” That I would be on board with. But… that seems like a “well, duh” which I expect most people would agree with, and if that was what the emotivists meant, I don’t see why they would express themselves the way they seem to.
I think a proper human morality somehow accounts for disgust having actually been an important part of how it was birthed.
I’m not sure if people maintain consistent distinctions between legal philosophy, ethics, and morality. But for whatever it is that governs our response to crimes, I think anger / desire-for-revenge is a more important part of it. Also the impulse to respond to threats (“Criminal on the streets! Who’s he coming for next?”), which I guess is fear and/or anger.
Come to think of it, if I try to think of things that people declare “immoral” that seem to come from disgust rather than fear or anger, I think of restrictions on sexual behavior (e.g. homosexuality, promiscuity) and drugs, which I think the law shouldn’t touch (except in forms where someone was injured nonconsensually, in which case revenge-anger comes into play). As emotions go, I think I’d distrust disgust more than the others.

localdeity 1 Sep 2024 16:20 UTC
4 points
2
on: What is Difference?
The problem that you seem to be reaching for is a real one. You may find enlightening Leslie Lamport’s “Buridan’s principle”:
A discrete decision based upon an input having a continuous range of values cannot be made within a bounded length of time.
The full paper discusses a similar situation:
Buridan’s Principle has appeared as a fundamental problem in computer design. In computing, a device that makes a discrete (usually binary) decision based upon a continuous input value is called an arbiter, and Buridan’s Principle is usually known as the Arbiter Problem [1].
...
If, as is usually the case, the peripheral device’s setting of the flag is not synchronized with the computer’s execution, then the computer’s binary decision is based upon an input having a continuous range of values. Buridan’s Principle asserts that the decision cannot be made in a bounded length of time. However, the computer must make that decision before beginning its next instruction, which generally happens in a fixed length of time.
The computer is thus trying to do something that is impossible. Just as the driver at the railroad crossing has a finite probability of being hit by the train, the computer has a finite probability of not making its decision in time. The physical manifestation of the computer’s indecision is that bad voltage levels are propagated. For example, if a 0 is represented by a zero voltage and a 1 is represented by +5 volts, then some wire might have a level of 2.5 volts. This leads to errors, because a 2.5 volt level could be interpreted as a 0 by some circuits and a 1 by others. The computer stops acting like a digital device and starts acting like a continuous (analog) one, with unpredictable results.
The Arbiter Problem is a classic example of Buridan’s Principle. The problem is not one of making the “right” decision, since it makes little difference if the interrupt is handled after the current instruction or after the following one; the problem is simply making a decision. The Arbiter Problem went unrecognized for a number of years because engineers did not believe that their binary circuit elements could ever produce “1/2’s”. The problem is solved in modern computers by allowing enough time for deciding so the probability of not reaching a decision soon enough is much smaller than the probability of other types of failure. For example, rather than deciding whether to interrupt execution after the current instruction, the computer can decide whether to interrupt it after the third succeeding instruction. With proper circuit design, the probability of not having reached a decision by time t is an exponentially decreasing function of t, so allowing a little extra time for the decision can make the probability of failure negligible.
...
Buridan’s Principle might lead one to suspect that a digital computer is an impossibility, since every step in its execution requires making discrete decisions within a fixed length of time. However, those decisions are normally based upon a discontinuous set of inputs. Whenever the value of a memory register is tested, each bit will be represented by a voltage whose value lies within two separate ranges—the range of values representing a zero or the range representing a one. Intermediate voltages are not possible because the register is never examined while it is in an intermediate state—for example, while a bit is changing from zero to one. The Arbiter Problem arises when the computer must interact asynchronously with an external device, since synchronization is required to prevent the computer from seeing an intermediate voltage level by reading a bit while the device is changing it. A similar problem occurs in interactions between the computer and its environment that require analog to digital conversion, such as video input.
The full paper is probably worth reading.

localdeity 8 Aug 2024 12:34 UTC
7 points
2
on: Meno’s Paradox
The paradox arises for people who lack a concept of “known unknowns” as distinct from “unknown unknowns”. If our knowledge of x can only be in the state of “we know what x is and everything about it” or “we don’t know anything about x and aren’t even aware that anything like x exists”, then the reasoning is all correct. However, for many things, that’s a false binary: there are a lot of intermediate states between “zero knowledge of the concept of x” and “100% knowledge of x”.

localdeity 3 Aug 2024 21:34 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Some comments on intelligence
Yeah, learning by reading at home definitely has a huge effect in many cases. In Terence Tao’s education, he was allowed to progress through multiple years of a subject per year (and to do so at different rates in different subjects), and since the classes he attended were normal ones, I think his academic progression must have been essentially determined by his ability to teach himself at home via textbooks. Unless perhaps they let him e.g. attend 7th grade science 2 days a week and 6th grade science the rest? I should learn more about his life.
The educational setup can also feed into the reading aspect. During my childhood, on a few occasions, I did explicitly think, “Well, I would like to read more of this math stuff (at home), but on the other hand, each thing I learn by reading at home is another thing I’ll have to sit through the teacher telling me, being bored because I already know it”, and actually decided to not read certain advanced math stuff because of that. (Years later, I changed my mind and chose to learn calculus from my sister’s textbook around 8th grade—which did, in fact, cause me to be bored sitting through BC Calculus eventually.) This could, of course, be solved by letting kids easily skip past stuff by taking a test to prove they’ve already learned it.

localdeity 2 Aug 2024 21:47 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Some comments on intelligence
Maybe with the objection that the time coefficient can be different for different school subjects, because some of them are more focused on understanding things, and others are more focused on memorizing things
Possibly. It’s also the case that IQ is an aggregated measure of a set of cognitive subtests, and the underlying capabilities they measure can probably be factored out into things like working memory, spatial reasoning, etc., which are probably all correlated but imperfectly so; then if some of those are more useful for some subjects than others, you’ll expect some variance in progression between subjects. And you certainly observe that the ultra-gifted kids, while generally above average at everything, are often significantly more ahead in math than in language, or vice versa (some of this is probably due to where they choose to spend their time, but I think a nonzero amount is innate advantage).
Among the various ways to take up the extra time of the rapid learners, probably the best one is “don’t go faster, go wider”.
The term of art, for doing this within a single subject, is “enrichment”. And yeah, if you can do it, it fits nicely into schedules. “Taking more classes” is a more general approach. There are administrative obstacles to the latter: K-12 schools seem unlikely to permit a kid to skip half the sessions of one class so he can attend half the sessions of another class (and make up any gaps by reading the textbooks). Colleges are more likely to permit this by default, due to often not having attendance requirements, though one must beware of double-booking exams.
(Note: I am not saying that this is optimal for the rapid learner. The optimal thing for the rapid learner would be to… learn faster, obviously.
I think the best setup—can’t find the citation—is believed to be “taking a class with equally gifted children of the same age, paced for them”. If you don’t have that, then skipping grades (ideally per-subject) would address knowledge gaps; taking a class paced for at least somewhat gifted kids (possibly called an “advanced” class, or a class at a high-tier college) would partly address the learning speed gap, and enrichment would also address the learning speed gap, to a variable extent depending on the details.
A more realistic example would be a math textbook, where each chapter is followed by exercises, some of them marked as “optional, too difficult”
A specific way of doing this, which I think would be good for education to move towards, is to have a programming component: have some of those optional exercises be “Write programs to implement the concepts from this chapter”.
But if I had to guess, I would guess that the gifted kids who stay within the confines of school will probably lose most of their advantage, and the ones who focus on something else (competitions, books, online courses, personal projects) will probably keep it.
Oh yup:
Subjects Not Permitted Acceleration. [...] With few exceptions, they have very jaded views of their education. Two dropped out of high school and a number have dropped out of university. Several more have had ongoing difficulties at university, not because of lack of ability but because they have found it difficult to commit to undergraduate study that is less than stimulating. These young people had consoled themselves through the wilderness years of undemanding and repetitive school curriculum with the promise that university would be different—exciting, intellectually rigorous, vibrant—and when it was not, as the first year of university often is not, it seemed to be the last straw.
Some have begun to seriously doubt that they are, indeed, highly gifted. The impostor syndrome is readily validated with gifted students if they are given only work that does not require them to strive for success. It is difficult to maintain the belief that one can meet and overcome challenges if one never has the opportunity to test oneself.
Versus:
Young People Who Have [skipped 3 or more grades by the end of high school]. [...] In every case, these young people have experienced positive short-term and long-term academic and socioaffective outcomes. The pressure to underachieve for peer acceptance lessened significantly or disappeared after the first acceleration. Despite being some years younger than their classmates, the majority topped their state in specific academic subjects, won prestigious academic prizes, or represented their country or state in Math, Physics, or Chemistry Olympiads. The majority entered college between ages 11 and 15. Several won scholarships to attend prestigious universities in Australia or overseas. All have graduated with extremely high grades and, in most cases, university prizes for exemplary achievement. All 17 are characterized by a passionate love of learning and almost all have gone on to obtain their Ph.D.s.
Though one could say this is more of an attitude and habit and “ever bothered to figure out study skills” thing, than a “you’ve permanently lost your advantage” thing. If you took one of those jaded dropouts (of 160+ IQ) and, at age 30, threw them into a job where they had to do some serious and challenging scientific work… There’s a chance that their attitude and habits would make them fail and get fired within the first few months, that chance depending on how severe and how ingrained they are. But if they did ok enough to not get fired, then I expect that, within a year, they would be pulling ahead of a hypothetical 120 IQ counterpart for whom everything had gone great and who started with slightly more knowledge.

localdeity 1 Aug 2024 21:45 UTC
6 points
0
on: Some comments on intelligence
I’ll give a citation on learning speed to show the extent of the problem, at least in early years (bold added):
Observation and investigation prove that in the matter of their intellectual work these children are customarily wasting much time in the elementary schools. We know from measurements made over a three-year period that a child of 140 IQ can master all the mental work provided in the elementary school, as established, in half the time allowed him. Therefore, one-half the time which he spends at school could be utilized in doing something more than the curriculum calls for. A child of 170 IQ can do all the studies that are at present required of him, with top “marks,” in about one-fourth the time he is compelled to spend at school. What, then, are these pupils doing in the ordinary school setup while the teacher teaches the other children who need the lessons?
No exhaustive discussion of time-wasting can be undertaken here, except to say briefly that these exceptional pupils are running errands, idling, engaging in “busy work,” or devising childish tasks of their own, such as learning to read backward—since they can already read forward very fluently. Many are the devices invented by busy teachers to “take up” the extra time of these rapid learners, but few of these devices have the appropriate character that can be built only on psychological insight into the nature and the needs of gifted children.
Note that this is above what the mere “intelligence quotient” seems to predict—i.e. at a given chronological age, IQ 140 children have 1.4x the mental age of those at IQ 100, and IQ 170 have 1.7x that mental age. So why would you get 2x and 4x learning speeds respectively?
One guess is that, at least within this elementary-school age range, higher mental age also means they’ve figured out better strategies for paying attention, noticing when you’ve understood something vs when you need to go back and re-read, etc.—which other kids may eventually figure out too. Another guess is that, for at least some kids, it seems that one of the things that manifests as higher intelligence is an increased need for intellectual stimulation; so in general, it may be that the higher-IQ kids are more naturally inclined to pay attention when the teacher is saying new things, and more inclined to read the textbook and think back to it, so there’s less need for self-control, and so they’re less handicapped by the lack of it in early years.
I don’t know how far up in age the above extends. I do expect the lower-IQ learning rate to catch up somewhat in later years, perhaps bringing the difference down to the IQ ratio. (The learning-rate difference certainly doesn’t disappear, though; I believe it’s common that if an exceptionally gifted kid gets accelerated into college classes with adults of equal knowledge—several of whom are probably moderately gifted—she’ll still finish at the top of her class.)

localdeity 30 Jul 2024 1:20 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Jeremy Gillen’s comment on: Has Eliezer publicly and satisfactorily responded to attempted rebuttals of the analogy to evolution?
There’s also a failure mode of focusing on “which arguments are the best” instead of “what is actually true”. I don’t understand this failure mode very well, except that I’ve seen myself and others fall into it. Falling into it looks like focusing a lot on specific arguments, and spending a lot of time working out what was meant by the words, rather than feeling comfortable adjusting arguments to fit better into your own ontology and to fit better with your own beliefs.
The most obvious way of addressing this, “just feel more comfortable adjusting arguments to fit better into your own ontology and to fit better with your own beliefs”, has its own failure mode, where you end up attacking a strawman that you think is a better argument than what they made, defeating it, and thinking you’ve solved the issue when you haven’t. People have complained about this failure mode of steelmanning a couple of times. At a fixed level of knowledge and thought about the subject, it seems one can only trade off one danger against the other.
However, if you’re planning to increase your knowledge and time-spent-thinking about the subject, then during that time it’s better to focus on the ideas than on who-said-or-meant-what; the latter is instrumentally useful as a source of ideas.

localdeity 28 Jul 2024 3:28 UTC
2 points
0
on: Common Uses of “Acceptance”
So, there’s no need to worry about the dictionary police enforcing how you should use a word, but understanding how “acceptance” is commonly used and comparing them to definitions found in common advice related to “acceptance” might help us
I see you practice acceptance. ;-)

localdeity 28 Jul 2024 3:00 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Common Uses of “Acceptance”
There was also a character, Kotomine Kirei, who was brought up with good ethics and tried to follow them, but ultimately realized that the only thing that pleased him was causing other people pain… and there’s an alternate universe work in which he runs a shop that sells insanely spicy mapo tofu. I suppose he could have gotten into the BDSM business as well. Drill sergeant? Interrogator? (That might not work, but there probably would be people who thought it did.)

localdeity 28 Jul 2024 0:45 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: lukemarks’s Shortform
I dropped out after 10th grade. I messed around at home, doing some math and programming, for ~6 years, then started working programming jobs at age 22 (nearly 10 years ago). I’d say results were decent.
A friend of mine dropped out after 11th grade. He has gone back and forth between messing around (to some extent with math and programming; in later years, with meditation) and working programming jobs, and I think is currently doing well with such a job. Probably also decent.
(And neither of us went to college, although I think my friend may have audited some classes.)

localdeity 26 Jul 2024 10:34 UTC
7 points
2
in reply to: papetoast’s comment on: Superbabies: Putting The Pieces Together
they use a relative ELO system
ELO itself is a relative system, defined by “If [your rating] - [their rating] is X, then we can compute your expected score [where win=1, draw=0.5, loss=0] as a function of X (specifically $\frac{1}{1 + 10^{- X / 400}}$ ).”
that is detached from the FIDE ELO
Looking at the Wiki, one of the complaints is actually that, as the population of rated human players changes, the meaning of a given rating may change. If you could time-teleport an ELO 2400 player from 1950 into today, they might be significantly different from today’s ELO 2400 players. Whereas if you have a copy of Version N of a given chess engine, and you’re consistent about the time (or, I guess, machine cycles or instructions executed or something) that you allow it, then it will perform at the same level eternally. Now, that being the case, if you want to keep the predictions of “how do these fare against humans” up to date, you do want to periodically take a certain chess engine (or maybe several) and have a bunch of humans play against it to reestablish the correspondence.
Also, I’m sure that the underlying model with ELO isn’t exactly correct. It asserts that, if player A beats player B 64% of the time, and player B beats player C 64% of the time, then player A must beat player C 76% of the time; and if we throw D into the mix, who C beats 64% of the time, then A and B must beat D 85% and 76% of the time, respectively. It would be a miracle if that turned out to be exactly and always true in practice. So it’s more of a kludge that’s meant to work “well enough”.
… Actually, as I read more, the underlying validity of the ELO model does seem like a serious problem. Apparently FIDE rules say that any rating difference exceeding 400 (91% chance of victory) is to be treated as a difference of 400. So even among humans in practice, the model is acknowledged to break down.
This is expensive to calculate
Far less expensive to make computers play 100 games than to make humans play 100 games. Unless you’re using a supercomputer. Which is a valid choice, but it probably makes more sense in most cases to focus on chess engines that run on your laptop, and maybe do a few tests against supercomputers at the end if you feel like it.
and the error bar likely increases as you use more intermediate engines.
It does, though to what degree depends on what the errors are like. If you’re talking about uncorrelated errors due to measurement noise, then adding up N errors of the same size (i.e. standard deviation) would give you an error of √N times that size. And if you want to lower the error, you can always run more games.
However, if there are correlated errors, due to substantial underlying wrongness of the Elo model (or of its application to this scenario), then the total error may get pretty big. … I found a thread talking about FIDE rating vs human online chess ratings, wherein it seems that 1 online chess ELO point (from a weighted average of online classical and blitz ratings) = 0.86 FIDE ELO points, which would imply that e.g. if you beat someone 64% of the time in FIDE tournaments, then you’d beat them 66% of the time in online chess. I think tournaments tend to give players more time to think, which tends to lead to more draws, so that makes some sense...
But it also raises possibilities like, “Perhaps computers make mistakes in different ways”—actually, this is certainly true; a paper (which was attempting to correspond FIDE to CCRL ratings by analyzing the frequency and severity of mistakes, which is one dimension of chess expertise) indicates that the expected mistakes humans make are about 2x as bad as those chess engines make at similar rating levels. Anyway, it seems plausible that that would lead to different … mechanics.
Here are the problems with computer chess ELO ratings that Wiki talks about. Some come from the drawishness of high-level play, which is also felt at high-level human play:
Human–computer chess matches between 1997 (Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov) and 2006 demonstrated that chess computers are capable of defeating even the strongest human players. However, chess engine ratings are difficult to quantify, due to variable factors such as the time control and the hardware the program runs on, and also the fact that chess is not a fair game. The existence and magnitude of the first-move advantage in chess becomes very important at the computer level. Beyond some skill threshold, an engine with White should be able to force a draw on demand from the starting position even against perfect play, simply because White begins with too big an advantage to lose compared to the small magnitude of the errors it is likely to make. Consequently, such an engine is more or less guaranteed to score at least 25% even against perfect play. Differences in skill beyond a certain point could only be picked up if one does not begin from the usual starting position, but instead chooses a starting position that is only barely not lost for one side. Because of these factors, ratings depend on pairings and the openings selected.^[48] Published engine rating lists such as CCRL are based on engine-only games on standard hardware configurations and are not directly comparable to FIDE ratings.

localdeity 24 Jul 2024 3:27 UTC
17 points
0
in reply to: PeterMcCluskey’s comment on: The Cancer Resolution?
It probably takes years before a tumor grows big enough for normal methods to detect it.
There exist fast-growing cancers. I figure that if the fungi theory is correct, then probably a good amount of this is caused by the specific fungus (and perhaps what part of the body that fungus targets), and most of the rest comes from the target’s immune system (not sure what else would contribute significantly). If transmission and mild infections are common, and if, say, 1% of cancers are fast-growing, I feel like there should be lots of cases where an immunocompromised person picks up a fast-growing cancer fungus at a hospital or something and, within a few years, gets diagnosable cancer. Enough that it should have been noticed. I don’t have numbers for this, but that’s my suspicion.
Or, for example… How often do couples get the same type of cancer? I found this:
METHODS
The authors identified 25,670 cancer-free married couples in northern California who were followed for up to 31 years for the development of cancer. In Cox proportional hazards analysis, the development of cancer in a spouse was treated as a time-dependent, independent variable, and spouse-with/spouse-without risk ratios were determined, controlling for age and gender. For selected concordant espoused pairs, additional explanatory information was sought in their medical records.
RESULTS
There was no excess concordance for all cancers combined; the spouse-with/spouse-without risk ratio was 0.97 (95% confidence interval, 0.90–1.05). Statistically significant husband-wife associations were found only for cancer of the tongue and stomach and for non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Except for cancer of the penis/endometrium and testis/vulva, based on one couple with each combination, gender specific cancers did not aggregate within married couples. Established and suspected risk factors, not necessarily related to the marriage, were found for some individuals who had concordance with their spouses.
CONCLUSIONS
Little spousal concordance for cancer occurrence was found. The study of spousal aggregation does not appear useful in identifying unsuspected environmental causes of cancer in heterogeneous populations in urban areas of affluent Western countries. A cohort study would have to be much larger than this one to detect weak spousal concordance reliably..
Also, for whatever Claude’s opinion is worth:
Q: How often do couples get the same type of cancer?
While it’s not extremely common for couples to get the same type of cancer, it does happen occasionally. This phenomenon has been studied, and there are several factors to consider:
1. Shared environmental factors: Couples often share the same living environment, diet, and lifestyle habits, which can expose them to similar cancer risk factors.
2. Similar behaviors: Shared behaviors like smoking, alcohol consumption, or sun exposure can increase risk for certain cancers in both partners.
3. Infectious agents: Some cancers are caused by infectious agents (like HPV for cervical cancer), which can be transmitted between partners.
4. Age-related risks: As couples age together, they may face similar age-related cancer risks.
5. Genetic factors: While not directly shared between couples, people might choose partners with similar genetic backgrounds, potentially influencing cancer risk.
6. Coincidence: Given the prevalence of cancer, some couples will develop the same cancer by chance.
7. Screening effect: When one partner is diagnosed, the other may be more likely to get screened, potentially leading to a diagnosis of a cancer that might have otherwise gone undetected.
Studies on this topic have shown:
- A slight increase in cancer risk for partners of cancer patients, but this varies by cancer type.
- Higher correlations for smoking-related cancers, suggesting shared lifestyle factors play a role.
- Increased risk for cancers with infectious causes, like stomach cancer (H. pylori) or liver cancer (hepatitis viruses).
It’s important to note that while interesting, these occurrences are not common enough to be considered a significant public health concern.

localdeity 24 Jul 2024 2:33 UTC
39 points
3
on: The Cancer Resolution?
My first significant thought (which came up a bit in the AIs’ output) is that it would seem that, if fungi cause cancer, then the fungi would at least sometimes be transmitted from one person to another, and if you weren’t aware of the fungi, then this would look like cancer being transmitted from one to the other. Yet I think this has basically never been observed.^[1]
One could try supposing that each fungus is only rarely able to infect people—only the few individuals that are unusually vulnerable to it. But, well. I imagine that would generally include anyone whose immune system is crippled. Surely there have been enough cases of people with cancer next to old, immunocompromised people in a hospital, with sufficient mistakes in hygiene that the one would have infected the other. Maybe there are additional requirements for an individual to be infected (the fungus has a favorite temperature? Acidity? Salt level?)… but even taking that into account, I think there should have been enough cases that we would have noticed. (If the chance of an individual being infectable by a given fungus is so low that we never see transmission, then how is it that, er, 1/6th of all deaths are caused by cancer? There would have to be zillions of different fungi, each of which is able to infect only a tiny number of people… which surely would have led to natural selection for much better infectivity by now?)
Incidentally, I think it is known that there are some viruses (like HPV) that cause (or greatly heighten the risk of) cancer. It’s plausible that fungi play a significantly larger role of this type than people realize. But for it to be the primary cause seems implausible.
The strongest evidence is that they found cancers that seem to have no mutations.
This seems worth digging into.
1. ^
  There are a few cases of cancers where it’s known that the actual cancer cells themselves go from organism to organism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonally_transmissible_cancer

localdeity 23 Jul 2024 21:30 UTC
3 points
0
on: Monthly Roundup #20: July 2024
Alexey Guzey reverses course,
I note that the date on the tweet is June 28, the day after the Trump-Biden debate. It mentions the office of President and concludes with arguments in favor of having an 80-year-old president with no serious arguments against.
I give 95% odds the tweet was causally downstream of the debate: either directly inspired, or a result of arguing with people about old age and cognitive decline, for whom the subject came up because of the debate.
I’m not entirely sure if, or how, it was meant to be a comment on the debate. It could be that he wanted to downplay any perceived downsides to having his favored candidate as president. It could be that the topic was in the air and he had a take and wrote it up. (It is in-character for him to double down on his contrarian take, expressing doubts about an entire field of research in the process—for all that he’s said about “used to be extremely confident”. [To be sure, his criticisms are often valid, but going from “here are valid criticisms of his opponents” to “the opposite of what his opponents believe is the truth”, or “you should throw out everything you thought you believed and just listen to the arguments he’s making”, is a risky leap.]) Who knows.
On the subject itself, he mentions slow memory recall, but not faulty memory, nor dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and so on. Those are real and substantial problems. Perhaps a more rigorous thesis would be “Old people who are not affected by dementia, Alzheimer’s, etc., including any subclinical levels thereof, can be intellectually very strong”, and one can think of examples bearing this out. However, it’s also true that the background probability of an 80-year-old having one or more of these issues is fairly high.

localdeity 23 Jul 2024 1:39 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: closedAI’s comment on: OpenAI Boycott Revisit
In context, I think “average people” means “the individual consumers paying $20/month to OpenAI”. Who do you mean by “many”? I doubt that posters at /r/localllama are representative of “average people” by the above definition.

localdeity 18 Jul 2024 19:53 UTC
14 points
10
in reply to: Richard_Ngo’s comment on: Optimistic Assumptions, Longterm Planning, and “Cope”
That is, your frame here is something like “planning is hard therefore you should distrust alignment plans”.
But you could just as easily frame this as “abstract reasoning about unfamiliar domains is hard therefore you should distrust doom arguments”.
I think received wisdom in cryptography is “don’t roll your own crypto system”. I think this comes from a bunch of overconfident people doing this and then other people discovering major flaws in what they did, repeatedly.
The lesson is not “Reasoning about a crypto system you haven’t built yet is hard, and therefore it’s equally reasonable to say ‘a new system will work well’ and ‘a new system will work badly’.” Instead, it’s “Your new system will probably work badly.”
I think the underlying model is that there are lots of different ways for your new crypto system to be flawed, and you have to get all of them right, or else the optimizing intelligence of your rivals (ideally) or the malware industry (less ideally) will find the security hole and exploit it. If there are ten things you need to get right, and you have a 30% chance of screwing up each one, then the chance of complete success is 2.8%. Therefore, one could say that, if there’s a general fog of “It’s hard to reason about these things before building them, such that it’s hard to say in advance that the chance of failure in each thing is below 30%”, then that points asymmetrically towards overall failure.
I think Raemon’s model (pretty certainly Eliezer’s) is indeed that an alignment plan is, in large parts, like a security system in that there are lots of potential weaknesses any one of which could torpedo the whole system, and those weaknesses will be sought out by an optimizing intelligence. Perhaps your model is different?

localdeity

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