MichaelLowe

Karma: 247

MichaelLowe May 25, 2025, 11:15 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: lc’s comment on: Jimrandomh’s Shortform Posts
I don’t see the awfulness, although tbh I have not read the original reactions. If you are not desensitized to what this community woudl consider irresponsible AI development speed, responding with “You are building and releasing an AI that can do THAT?!” rather understandable. It is relatively unfortunate that it is the safety testing people that get the flack (if this impression is accurate) though.

MichaelLowe Apr 24, 2025, 10:57 AM
7 points
1
in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: MichaelDickens’s Shortform
This is a good post, but it applies unrealistic standards and therefore draws too strong conclusions.
>And at least OpenAI and Anthropic have been caught lying about their motivations:
Just face it: It is very normal for big companies to lie. That does make many of their press and public facing statements not trustworthy, but is not predictive of their general value system and therefore actions. Plus Anthropic, unlike most labs, did in fact support a version of SB 1047 at all. That has to count for something.

>There is a missing mood here. I don’t know what’s going on inside the heads of x-risk people such that they see new evidence on the potentially imminent demise of humanity and they find it “exciting”.
In a similar vein, humans do not act or feel rationally in light of their beliefs, and changing your behavior completely in response to a years off event is just not in the cards for the vast majority of folks. Therefore do not be surprised that there is a missing mood, just like it is not surprising that people who genuinely believe in the end of humanity due to climate change do not adjust their behavior accordingly. Having said that, I did sense a general increase and preponderance of anxiety when o3 was announced, perhaps that was a point where it started to feel real for many folks.
Either way, I really want to stress that concluding much about the beliefs of folks based on these reactions is very tenuous, just like concluding that a researcher must not really care about AI safety because instead of working a bit more they watch some TV in the evening.

MichaelLowe Mar 17, 2023, 1:56 PM
1 point
0
on: ARC tests to see if GPT-4 can escape human control; GPT-4 failed to do so
For the sake of correctness/completeness: The chemical compound purchase was not done by ARC, but by another unspecified red-team.

MichaelLowe Dec 1, 2021, 8:05 PM
1 point
on: Omicron Variant Post #2
There are now enough cases in Europe to get a faint idea of local transmission dynamics. Of the 11 known cases so far in Germany, only one has transmitted the virus. Israel has 4 cases, with one local transmission attributable to them. Portugal has 13 cases, with 12 of those being local transmission all attributable to the same index case.

If we can collect similar information from other countries, we could get reasonable estimates of R_eff.

Source for Germany: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1BA2GoeVMhC_dCcnl5qtR-fxpCwVH6xu8T3LxHUss1Gw/htmlview

MichaelLowe Nov 30, 2021, 5:11 PM
8 points
on: Visible Thoughts Project and Bounty Announcement
This looks exciting! I wonder about the proposed training setup: If one model produces the thoughts, and another one takes those as input to the prompts, are we actually learning anything about the internal state of either model? What is the advantage (beyond scalability) of this training setup vs just using the second model to produce continuations conditional on thoughts?

MichaelLowe Nov 25, 2021, 11:19 AM
8 points
on: Paxlovid Remains Illegal: 11/24 Update
For an unreasonable narrow interpretation that only counts those for whom the medicine was already sitting in a warehouse waiting for approval, and treat that shortage as a ‘whoops, making things is hard and takes time’ rather than a directly caused effect, the FDA is going to directly murder about 20,000 people in the United States.
I disagree with this, in that my lowest count on FDA related deaths is approximately zero, or less than 100, for the exact reason that Gurkenglas mentioned below. The post already recognizes that there is a manufacturing bottleneck, so if we assume that the FDA approval process has not caused the bottleneck, the 180 000 pills available by the end of the year will be given out later, with an admittedly non zero loss of efficiency.
Why should we assume that the FDA approval has not caused that bottleneck? Because we should assume that if a prediction market knows the drug is getting approval, Pfizer knows it as well, and will manufacture as quickly as possible once they know the efficacy numbers. Sells of the drug will be supply, and not demand constrained, even through 2022. 50 million doses (the projected capacity for 2022) is not enough to cover the developed world.
Weak evidence: Molnupiravir was approved in the UK earlier this month, but is still not available. I am not certain whether that is entirely due UK’s decision to further test it in a trial for vaccinated people (which indeed will cost many lives).
Caveats: I am not saying that the FDA would act differently if there was no manufacturing bottleneck, just that in this case the slow FDA decision is much smaller.
Pfizer might also have some uncertainty because they do not know whether the FDA will approve the use of the drug for vaccinated people, which indeed might reduce upfront investment. But that is not directly related to the delay of the approval in itself.

MichaelLowe Nov 19, 2021, 1:16 PM
6 points
on: Covid 11/18: Paxlovid Remains Illegal
Seems like Austria quickly acquiesced to your viewpoint, today they announced mandatory vaccination starting February, and in the meantime a lockdown for everybody. Personally, I would be fairly disappointed in their legal system if mandatory vaccination is allowed to stand, as the more sensible solution (mandatory vaccination and boosters for 65+ like France) would do the trick as well.
https://www.politico.eu/article/austria-mandatory-coronavirus-vaccination-february/

MichaelLowe Sep 10, 2021, 1:07 PM
1 point
in reply to: Vanilla_cabs’s comment on: I read “White Fragility” so you don’t have to (but maybe you should)
Yes, absolutely. But that is not my definition, just the one that (as I understand it) DiAngelo gives.

MichaelLowe Sep 10, 2021, 11:05 AM
2 points
on: I read “White Fragility” so you don’t have to (but maybe you should)
I would argue that DiAngelo’s and the progressive left definition of racism is not congruent and contradictory. On the one hand, it is defined by consequences alone : “Beliefs and actions are racist if they lead to minorities continued disadvantage compared to Whites.” Regardless of the connotation and baggage of the word, this is a useful concept.
However, this also means that pretty much everything you do is racist if you actually follow the definition: You do not want to attend a diversity seminar, forget about race and just do your work? By not addressing racist structures, you are enforcing them, and that is therefore racist. You merely want to read a fantasy novel before going to bed? Well, that keeps society the way it is, and therefore contributes to racism. Sounds extreme, but I contend that this is the logical consequence of that definition. And as an aside, a white CEO publicly using the n-word, and thereby being fired and replaced by a person of color, would not be racist by that definition.

MichaelLowe Aug 31, 2021, 8:02 PM
1 point
in reply to: Timothy Underwood’s comment on: Online LessWrong Community Weekend
Hey, we sent out our first batch of responses on Friday, could you kindly check your spam folder?

MichaelLowe Aug 31, 2021, 8:02 PM
3 points
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: Online LessWrong Community Weekend
Hey, we sent out our first batch of responses on Friday, could you kindly check your spam folder?

MichaelLowe Aug 13, 2021, 11:25 PM
1 point
in reply to: ADifferentAnonymous’s comment on: A Response to A Contamination Theory of the Obesity Epidemic
Obesity rates in China are rapidly rising, I doubt that there is a strong corresponding increase in soybean oil.

MichaelLowe Jul 26, 2021, 7:14 PM
11 points
on: A Contamination Theory of the Obesity Epidemic
Note that Korea and Japan have very low obesity rates (around 2-3%), despite being highly developed and having widespread availability of hyper-palatable food. Definitely worth to check whether some chemicals are more present literally everywhere else than in those two countries.
Contra the obvious genetic hypothesis, genetically similar China and Taiwan have very high rates of obesity. I don’t know whether Koreans and Japanese might be genetically closer to each other than to Han Chinese.
Given the Confucian influence on the culture of Korea and Japan, maybe it is peer pressure that keeps people from becoming overweight? Plausible, so it might be worth to look into the case of hikkikomoris, which is the Japanese phenomenon of refusing to leave your room/apartment for months or years while being supported (usually) by your parents. As such, they are likely not actively managing their weight. They are obviously a hard group to survey, but these studies looked into characteristics of hikkikomori and neither mentioned overweight, so that is a point for cultural or genetic reasons.
However, your linked paper says that Japanese that move to America do tend to gain weight, so it cannot all just be genetics.
I wonder whether Asian kids adopted by non-Asian parents are more often overweight than kids raised by Asian parents.

MichaelLowe Jul 22, 2021, 8:50 AM
10 points
in reply to: RHollerith’s comment on: ($1000 bounty) How effective are marginal vaccine doses against the covid delta variant?
This does not seem to be the case in Turkey, where they are right now handing out third doses of existing vaccines to people.

MichaelLowe Jul 17, 2021, 10:41 AM
4 points
on: What are some examples from history where a scientific theory predicted a significant experimental observation in advance?
“It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”
In their 1953 DNA helix paper, Watson and Crick also predicted that DNA would replicate in a semiconservative manner. This was later confirmed to be true in Meselson’s and Stahl’s experiment in 1958.

MichaelLowe Jul 1, 2021, 8:34 PM
2 points
in reply to: Jozdien’s comment on: Online LessWrong Community Weekend
That sounds awesome! Indeed, last year’s Aumann game was great fun, so I am sure someone will be happy to organize it.

MichaelLowe Jun 13, 2021, 11:42 AM
28 points
on: Covid vaccine safety: how correct are these allegations?
As others have said, I strongly dislike posting of 3 hour videos without any timemark or summary of the main points. This is making the community do the work of extracting the information; on top of that people will not watch most (or any) of the video before commenting, so discussion quality will be low.
To not be completely negative, I watched the section on “Vaccine suffers censored” (there are time marks in the description on youtube) where all three of them claim explicitly that there is no monitoring. This is clearly inaccurate, for example we know that Israel has recently reported that myocarditis might be occurring more often than expected in young men. In addition, I know that Germany has the SafeVac app to make it easier for people to report side effects after vaccination.

MichaelLowe Jun 3, 2021, 4:46 PM
2 points
in reply to: Sameerishere’s comment on: Is there a way to test your personal COVID vaccine response? How do corticosteroids impact response?
Sure; there is plenty of research on kids with asthma taking vaccines, e.g. here
“Varicella vaccine failure in children was not associated with asthma or the use of inhaled steroids, but with the use of oral steroids” .
For the same opinion as guideline, see here.
I believe the drugs.com reference is automatically generated; their database lookup (presumably!) works this way: “brand name”-> “name of substance”-> “interactions of this substance with another substance (in this case the vaccine)”. I.e. they do not make a disambiguation between form of administration.
What links here?
- Is there a way to test your personal COVID vaccine response? How do corticosteroids impact response? by Sameerishere (Jun 3, 2021, 5:08 AM; 13 points)

MichaelLowe Jun 3, 2021, 2:30 PM
2 points
on: Is there a way to test your personal COVID vaccine response? How do corticosteroids impact response?
2) There are some real concerns regarding systemic corticosteroid effects, but they mostly apply when getting shots and (I think) tablets. Inhaled budesonide has a much shorter half life and reduced bio availability, so there is much less reason for concern.

MichaelLowe May 31, 2021, 10:04 AM
7 points
on: Why don’t long running conversations happen on LessWrong?
Long running conversations are extremely common on old-style bulletin message boards/fora (see here for an example. This is mostly/solely because of the software design where threads are ordered only by the latest reply. Whether or not this leads to qualitative debate is another matter, often the same points get belaboured ad nauseam and moderators have to close old threads.

MichaelLowe

“It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”