I’m going to be unfair here—there is a limit to how much specificity one can expect in a brief quote but: In what sense is the difficulty “mathematical in essence”, and just how ignorant of how much mathematics are the physiologists in question? Consider a problem where the exact solution of the model equations turns out to be an elliptic integral—but where the practically relevant range is adequately represented by a piecewise linear approximation, or by a handful of terms in a power series. Would ignorance of the elliptic integral be a fatal flaw here?
soreff
Karma: 730
Mostly agreed. If I were to stand on a soapbox and say “light with a wavelength of 523.4371 nm is visible to the human eye”, it would fall into the category of an unsubstantiated claim by a single person. But it is implied by the general knowledge that the human visual range is from roughly 400 nm to roughly 700 nm, and that has been confirmed by anyone who has looked at a spectrum with even crude wavelength calibration.
“Temporarily” can be quite a long time… So when can we expect to probe plank-energy physics solidly enough to really test how quantum gravity works? :)
and isn’t there, or wasn’t there, some Islamic sect where people try to find God by spinning around?
Only as a hypothetical possibility. (From such evidence as I’ve seen I don’t think either really exists. And I have seen a fair number of Wiccan ceremonies—which seem like reasonably decent theater, but that’s all.) One could construe some biblical passages as predicting some sort of duel—and if one believed those passages, and that interpretation, then the question of whether one side was overstating its chances would be relevant.
The difference would be that if worship of Jehovah gets you eternal life in heaven, and worship of Astarte gets you eternal torture and damnation, then you should worship Jehovah and not Astarte. Also, if Astarte knows this, but pretends otherwise, then Astarte’s a liar.
Or perhaps neither Jehovah nor Astarte knows now who will dominate in the end, and any promises either makes to any followers are, ahem, over-confident? :-) There was a line I read somewhere about how all generals tell their troops that their side will be victorious...
Would a constructor of asynchronous process-level parallel structures be a daemon wrangler?
I apologize. I should have been clearer. I mean that if a group of weapons developers, such as, for instance, the Manhattan Project, discovers certain critical technical data necessary to their weapons, such as, for instance, the critical mass of Pu-239, they will often prefer that these truths not spread to other groups. For as long as they are able to keep this knowledge secret, it is indeed a set of truths that makes this set of weapons designers distinct from other groups.
I think a group could make itself very distinct by believing certain truths and doing certain rationally justified things.
Most groups of weapon developers probably hope to keep their knowledge distinct from that of other groups for as long as they can...
The other ones would have an abnormally strong will to override barriers and self-modify, which can easily make them just as dangerous.
You are overlooking the extreme situations some people are forced into. Looking at the act as being primarily a function of a person’s internal state state can be a poor approximation. As nearly as I can tell, if an arbitrarily selected person in the West were put in a situation as dire as these infanticidal mothers had been forced into, they would quite probably do the same thing.
Note that the geographical variation in infanticide rates is more plausibly consistent with external factors driving the rates than internal factors. The populations of the USA and Canada are not hugely different, yet there is a 2X difference in the rates between them (as I quoted from the article that I cited before). I strongly doubt that the proportion of psychopaths and extreme self-modifiers differs so strongly between the two nations—but the US has been shredding its social safety nets for years.
harmful, unsympathetic psychopaths
There is another, quite different, situation where it happens: Highly stressed mothers of newborns.
The answer to this couldn’t be more clear: humans are very different from macaques. We’re much worse. The anxiety caused by human inequality is unlike anything observed in the natural world. In order to emphasize this point, Robert Sapolsky put all kidding aside and was uncharacteristically grim when describing the affects of human poverty on the incidence of stress-related disease.
“When humans invented poverty,” Sapolsky wrote, “they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever before seen in the primate world.”
This is clearly seen in studies looking at human inequality and the rates of maternal infanticide. The World Health Organization Report on Violence and Health reported a strong association between global inequality and child abuse, with the largest incidence in communities with “high levels of unemployment and concentrated poverty.” Another international study published by the American Journal of Psychiatry analyzed infanticide data from 17 countries and found an unmistakable “pattern of powerlessness, poverty, and alienation in the lives of the women studied.”
The United States currently leads the developed world with the highest maternal infanticide rate (an average of 8 deaths for every 100,000 live births, more than twice the rate of Canada). In a systematic analysis of maternal infanticide in the U.S., DeAnn Gauthier and colleagues at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette concluded that this dubious honor falls on us because “extreme poverty amid extreme wealth is conducive to stress-related violence.” Consequently, the highest levels of maternal infanticide were found, not in the poorest states, but in those with the greatest disparity between wealth and poverty (such as Colorado, Oklahoma, and New York with rates 3 to 5 times the national average). According to these researchers, inequality is literally killing our kids.
Three types of cones, plus one type of rod....
The idea is that a woman repeatedly getting pregnant and then killing the child is putting a lot of strain on society, both in terms of resources and in terms of comfort. We allow a lot of privileges for pregnant women and new mothers, with the expectation that they’re trying to bring new people into society, something we encourage.
I’d think that that the bulk of the resource cost of a newborn is the physiological cost (and medical risks) the mother endured during pregnancy. The general societal cost seems small in comparison.
1514 public predictions? Gwern, you don’t just have more courage than I have. You have orders of magnitude more courage than I have.
I’m probably also an ex-rationalist. Simply looking at the list of biases that I should really be correcting for in making a decision under uncertainty is rather intimidating. I’d like to be right—but do I really want to be right that much?
Frankly, the fact that I still maintain a cryonics membership is really status quo bias: I set that up before
Reading The Crack of a Future Dawn—downgrade by 2X if uploads/ems dominate and are impoverished to the point of being on the edge of survivable subsistence.
Watching the repugnant Leon Kass lead a cheerleading section for the grim reaper from the chairmanship of W’s bioethics council. Extending human lifespans is a hard enough technical problem—but I hadn’t imagined that there was going to be a whole faction on the side of death. Downgrade the odds by another 2X if there is a faction trying to actively keep cryonicists dead.
Watching Watson perform impressively in an open problem domain. The traditional weakness of classical AI has been brittleness, breaking spectacularly on moving outside of a very narrow domain. That firewall against ufAI has now been breached. Yet another downgrade of 2X for this hazard gaining strength...
any more than we’re talking about a historical Clark Kent.
Yes, I was indeed alluding to User:Clippy. Actually, I should have tweaked the reference, since it it the possibility of a paperclip maximiser that has FOOMed that really represents the threat.
Good discussion, and a good reference.
Re DSimon’s:
My general position has been that it would be better for the US public if the FDA even more strongly regulated against treatments which do not go through the full clinical trial gamut with high marks. I don’t like it when people who are in crisis are vulnerable to getting ripped off by snake oil salesmen.
FDAReview says:
If the U.S. system resulted in appreciably safer drugs, we would expect to see far fewer postmarket safety withdrawals in the United States than in other countries. Bakke et al. (1995) compared safety withdrawals in the United States with those in Great Britain and Spain, each of which approved more drugs than the United States during the same time period. Yet, approximately 3 percent of all drug approvals were withdrawn for safety reasons in the United States, approximately 3 percent in Spain, and approximately 4 percent in Great Britain. There is no evidence that the U.S. drug lag brings greater safety.
(This was actually something of a surprise to me. My wife has been on a couple of medications which have since been withdrawn, so I’ve been getting increasingly uncomfortable with the general level of safety of pharmaceuticals, so I’d been leaning in DSimon’s direction on this—but this evidence says that increased scrutiny from the FDA hasn’t been helping)
The section on off-label uses of drugs is also very persuasive:
Yet any textbook or medical guide discussing stomach ulcers will mention amoxicillin as a potential treatment, and a doctor who did not consider prescribing amoxicillin or other antibiotic for the treatment of stomach ulcers would today be considered highly negligent. Off-label uses are in effect regulated according to the FDA’s pre-1962 rules (which required only safety, not efficacy), whereas on-label uses are regulated according to the post-1962 rules.
I’m not sure I’d quite agree with
entirely abandon restrictions on what drugs / treatments doctors can prescribe.
The phase I trials, looking for human toxicity, still sound reasonable. To my mind, it does look like the efficacy trials should be moved out of the FDA—basically crowd-sourced as post-market data gathering.
I agree with
Require all patient data to be public (once anonymized).
It would help if as many groups as possible have the opportunity to dig through the data as possible. One caveat/suggestion: Epidemiological studies tend to be terrible at giving solid conclusions. Double blind randomized studies are able to cancel out far more of the confounding variables. I suggest that, for any medical decisions that are anywhere close to a 50:50 decision, that an incentive be offered to explicitly randomize the decision and record that fact, along with the other outcome data on the case. Where there is uncertainty anyway, this won’t hurt the participating patients on average anyway, and it would embed a continuous stream of randomized trials in the available data.
Best wishes. Was your previous explanation earlier in your interchange with Bugmaster? If so, I agree that Bugmaster would have read your explanation, and that pointing to it wouldn’t help (I sympathize). If, however, your previous explanation was in response to another lesswrongian, it is possible that Bugmaster missed it, in which case a pointer might help. I’ve been following your comments, but I’m sure I’ve missed some of them.
And stay there? Or visit it as part of, for instance, a random walk?