ChristianKleineidam

Chris­ti­anKleinei­dam’s Quick takes

• ChristianKleineidam 19 Jan 2026 11:47 UTC

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  on: Chris­ti­anKleinei­dam’s Quick takes

  At the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya did a lot to reduce animal experimentation and thus reduce animal suffering. As far as ChatGPT can tell, this seems to be completely ignored by the Effective Altruism forum.
  
  Marty Makary’s FDA is also taking it’s steps to reduce the need of animal testing for FDA approvals.
  
  Is this simply, because Effective Altruists don’t like the Trump administration so they can’t take the win of MAHA bringing contrarians into control of health policy that do things like caring more about reducing animal suffering and fighting the replication crisis?

• ChristianKleineidam 11 Nov 2024 8:32 UTC

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  in reply to: Arturo Macias’s comment on: Can democ­racy be im­proved with ran­dom se­lec­tion?

  When speaking about “merit” of judges, the useful for what that means in practice.

  For low-level judges, that often means exam scores. In merit-based systems, you need good exam scores to become a judge.

  For experienced judges you can measure merit by how much of their judgements get overturned by higher courts. A judge who constantly makes judgements that get overturned is bad at seeking legal consensus.

  In common law jurisdiction you could also measure how often the opinion of the judge on cases get cited by opinions from other courts.

[Question] How should ve­g­ans think about Methio­nine needs?

• ChristianKleineidam 31 Oct 2024 16:25 UTC

  4 points

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  in reply to: Arturo Macias’s comment on: Can democ­racy be im­proved with ran­dom se­lec­tion?

  When choosing justices on the one hand you want to choose them meritocratically and on the other hand, you want that the views of the population are well represented.

  For justices in lower courts who are just supposed to rule in the way the higher courts would, you can just pick them meritocratically without problems if the higher courts are selected in a way that represents the view of the population.

• ChristianKleineidam 28 Oct 2024 21:34 UTC

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  on: Can democ­racy be im­proved with ran­dom se­lec­tion?

  If you have a bicameral legislature, having one chamber be selected via sortition and the other be selected via a more conventional election would be one good option.

• ChristianKleineidam 24 Oct 2024 22:10 UTC

  5 points

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  on: Ve­gan Nutri­tion Test­ing Pro­ject: In­terim Report

  Everyone had at least one amino acid deficiency, including the person eating over 100g of protein/​day. I don’t know how big a deal this actually is.

  Did everyone have a methionine deficiency or different amino acid deficiencies?

• ChristianKleineidam 10 Apr 2024 20:21 UTC

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  on: De­creas­ing pop­ulism and im­prov­ing democ­racy, ev­i­dence-based policy, and rationality

  Debating societies—for instance an initiative to debunk conspiracies.

  When it comes to debunking conspiracy theories, the right way to do it is by looking at the evidence.

  Debating societies are inherently about making clever arguments without looking at the evidence. That’s not helpful for getting people to deal better with conspiracy theories.
  

• ChristianKleineidam 16 Sep 2023 2:20 UTC

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  in reply to: Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸’s comment on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  What rules? Those need to be more clear if there is going to be community policing.

  This is a good chance for people to write posts about what the rules should be.

  You get there by having more discourse not less.

• ChristianKleineidam 16 Sep 2023 2:08 UTC

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  in reply to: Ebenezer Dukakis’s comment on: Clos­ing Notes on Non­lin­ear Investigation

  It seems that a major problem of a competitor to CEA Community Health is that it’s harder for someone outside of the US to have the connection to get the necessary information.

  The Wikileaks strategy against defamation suits was to have the spokesperson of the organization be a digital nomad, so there’s no address to which you can easily serve papers for lawsuits.

  Otherwise, maybe Scandinavian countries or some Eastern European ones could have a good combination of low legal costs of lawsuits and strong free speech laws.

  Maybe you can do all the money movement for the org in crypto and have no clear country to which the org belongs.

• ChristianKleineidam 16 Sep 2023 1:43 UTC

  4 points

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  in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: Clos­ing Notes on Non­lin­ear Investigation

  Though I have less faith in Ben than before after seeing him publish without waiting a week

  It seems to me like by publishing it when he did, he acted according to Alice and Chloe’s interested who were protected by an earlier publication at a cost to other parties.

  If I were in the position of someone like Alice or Chloe and think about whether or not to talk to Ben, that would make me more likely to talk to Ben not less.

• ChristianKleineidam 30 Jun 2023 16:08 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Start­ing the sec­ond Green Revolution

  One way might be to replace monoculture fields with more complex farming while everything gets managed by AI.

• ChristianKleineidam 5 Apr 2023 16:48 UTC

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  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: Ad­vice on com­mu­ni­cat­ing in and around the biose­cu­rity policy community

  Are you sure that virologists didn’t write such OPs?

  Pretty much, when I googled about the fact that they took down the database I found no such OPeds. If you have any evidence to the contrary I would love to see it.

  If you talk about that it’s wrong that they took down the database that points to the fact that the early lab leak denial was bullshit and the virologists cared nobody finding out that the arguments they made were bullshit.

  Jeremy Farrar describes in his book that one of the key arguments they used to reject the lab leak theory as the huge distance from the openly published sequences to the COVID-19 sequence. That argument becomes a lot weaker when you factor in that the military overtook the lab in September 2019 and at that month they took down their database.

  The virologists cared more about keeping the public uninformed about what happened at the Wuhan Institute for Virology than they cared about the database being available to help for fighting the pandemic.

  My understanding is that in the US, they actually studied these questions hard and knew about things like airborn transmission and asymptomatic spread pretty early on, but were suppressed by the Trump administration.

  Knowing that airborne transmission matters has consequences about what actions you want to take.

  When the Japanese health authorities advice at the beginning of the pandemic to avoid closed spaces with poor ventilation US and EU authorities didn’t give that advice.

  I find it pretty unlikely that Fauci et al didn’t give the same advice of avoiding closed spaces that the Japanese authorities gave out because the Trump administration didn’t want them to tell people to avoid closed spaces but the Trump administration preferred the advice of telling people to wash their hands.

  One of the corollaries of “avoid closed spaces with poor ventilation” is that forbidding people from meeting each other outside is bad policy.

  The 1.5 meter distance recommendation makes little sense with airborne spread but was quite central for pandemic guidance.

  There’s some research that suggests that flu transmission can be reduced in school by controlling the humidity level. There’s a good chance that you can also reduce COVID-19 transmission by controlling indoor humidity but the virologists didn’t care enough about doing the basic research to establish that to get a policy in place that all public buildings get humidity controlled.

  There was no ramp-up of indoor ventilation production at the start of the pandemic but it would have been the reasonable step if the problem would have been seen as one of airborne transmission.

  The WHO took two years to acknowledge airborne transmission. If the virologist community would have done their job, they would have explained to the WHO early on that it has to acknowledge airborne transmission or be branded by the virologists as science deniers.

• ChristianKleineidam 30 Mar 2023 20:04 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: Ad­vice on com­mu­ni­cat­ing in and around the biose­cu­rity policy community

  The international community funded a database of Coronaviruses that was held by the lab in Wuhan. In September 2019, the month when the Chinese military overtook the lab, that database was taken offline.

  If that database would have been important for pandemic prevention and vaccine development, I would have expected the virologists to write OPs publically calling on China to release the data. That they didn’t is a clear statement about what they think for how useful that data is for pandemic prevention and how afraid they are that people look critically at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

  I’m curious to know whether and to what extent we’ve considered ways to reward basic science researchers for making pandemic-mitigating discoveries in a public health context.

  The virologists seemed to ignore the basic science questions such as “How do these viruses spread?” and “Are they airborne?” that actually mattered.

  Asking those questions would mean doing more biomedical research that isn’t gain of function and loss of function.

  have to explain how they’d motivate already-beleaguered scientists to do GoF research when their proposal is “even more stick, still no carrot.”

  That assumes that it’s important to motivate them to do GoF research. It seems that research served for them as a distraction from doing the relevant research.

• ChristianKleineidam 30 Mar 2023 19:54 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Ad­vice on com­mu­ni­cat­ing in and around the biose­cu­rity policy community

  My impression is that one of the key defenses that the Fauci/​NIH/​EcoHealth/​etc. offered for their research in Wuhan was that it was technically not Gain of Function, even if some parts of it might sound like Gain of Function to the layperson, which seems in tension with this claim.

  It not only sounds that way to a lay-person. The NIH stopped the EcoHealth grant that was partly paying for the research in Wuhan for a short time in 2016. When they renewed the grant Peter Dasek from EcoHealth wrote back:

  “This is terrific! We are very happy to hear that our Gain of Function research funding pause has been lifted.”

  Fauci himself wrote on the 1st February 2020 and email that had one of the study in the attachment with the file name “Baric, Shi et al—Nature medicine—SARS Gain of function”.

  What Fauci/​NIH/​EcoHealth is saying seems to be something like “when people say ‘gain of function’ they really mean ePPP and the research they funded in Wuhan wasn’t ePPP because we never put it through the P3O process that could have decided that it was an ePPP”.

[Question] What hap­pened to the OpenPhil OpenAI board seat?

• ChristianKleineidam 15 Mar 2023 17:00 UTC

  6 points

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  in reply to: ojorgensen’s comment on: GPT-4 is out: thread (& links)

  The other alternative was that there was some coordination about releasing LLM. Plenty of people argue that they somehow should coordinate, so it would not be surprising if they actually did it.

• ChristianKleineidam 15 Mar 2023 14:21 UTC

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  on: GPT-4 is out: thread (& links)

  There’s the claim that GPT-4 is better at not going off the guardrails and that Bing runs on GPT-4. How does that fit together with Bing’s behavior?

• ChristianKleineidam 9 Mar 2023 17:07 UTC

  −12 points

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  in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Abuse in LessWrong and ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­ni­ties in Bloomberg News

  This definitely indicates a mishandling of the situation, that leaves room for improvement.

  I agree with that and do think that having a better system to share information would be good.

  With regards to the latter, if someone was triggering psychotic breaks in my community, I would feel no shame in kicking them out, even if it was unintentional.

  If Vassar tells someone about how the organization for which they are working is corrupt and the person Vassar is talking with considers his arguments persuasive, that’s going to be bad for their mental health.

  Anna Salamon wrote that post because she believes that some arguments made about how CFAR was corrupt were reasonable arguments.

  To the extent that the rationalist ideal makes sense, it includes not ostracising people for speaking out uncomfortable truths even if those uncomfortable truths are bad for the mental health of some people.

  We already know he’s been using his connection with Yud (via HPMOR) to try and seduce people.

  The seduction here is “Look, I’m bad in a way that I served as a template for the evil villain”.

  While “X is a bad boy” can be attractive to some women, it should be a very clear sign that he’s poor relationship material. It also shouldn’t be surprising for anyone when he’s actually a bad boy in that relationship.

  A woman who wants a relationship with a bad boy can find that and it feels a bit paternalistic to say that a woman who wants that shouldn’t get any opportunity to get that.

  I do think there are good reasons not to have him at meetups but it’s a complex decision.

• ChristianKleineidam 8 Mar 2023 20:33 UTC

  15 points

  7 ∶ 2

  in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Abuse in LessWrong and ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­ni­ties in Bloomberg News

  Neither Scotts banning of Vassar nor the REACH banning was quiet. It’s just that there’s no process by which those people who organize Slate Star Codex meetups are made aware.

  It turns out that plenty of people who organize Slate Star Codex meetups are not in touch with Bay Area community drama. The person who organized that SSC online meetup was from Israel.

  Even in the comments here where some very harsh allegations are made against him

  That’s because some of the harsh allegations don’t seem to hold up. Scott Alexander spent a significant amount of time investigating and came up with:

  While I disagree with Jessica’s interpretations of a lot of things, I generally agree with her facts (about the Vassar stuff which I have been researching; I know nothing about the climate at MIRI). I think this post gives most of the relevant information mine would give. I agree with (my model of) Jessica that proximity to Michael’s ideas (and psychedelics) was not the single unique cause of her problems but may have contributed.