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
Karma: 432
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.
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.
One way might be to replace monoculture fields with more complex farming while everything gets managed by AI.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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?
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.
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.
There are different concerns when it comes to Authentic Revolution and the EA community. Authentic Revolution hosts events where people become emotionally vulnerable which calls for rules that prevent that vulnerable state from being abused by people leading the events.
In the EA community, a lot of concerns about power abuse are about helping with professional connections. Waiting three months reduces the emotional impact of an Authentic Revolution event but it changes little about the power a person in a leadership role has to help a person to get a job at an EA org.
Well, you’re right that signaling intelligence, creativity, wisdom, and moral virtues is sexually and romantically attractive.
Signaling intelligence, creativity, wisdom, and moral virtues is not the same as signaling social power by leading events.
To the extent that people have power through their roles, that’s not directly about signaling intelligence, creativity, wisdom, and moral virtues.
Next, there are four other occasions where something a bit like this has happened. How many of these happened after the main events described here? I guess 2 or 3. So even after upsetting someone like this, this pattern continues. This does make me question a Owen’s judgenent.
To me, Owen’s post reads like he didn’t notice at the time that he upset her. Owen writes: “She was in a structural position where it was (I now believe) unreasonable to expect honesty about her experience”.
It’s unclear how long it took for Owen to know how uncomfortable he made her.
The great thing about monetary prices is that there are market mechanisms that keep the numbers honest.
If you want to measure your TEMS value you don’t have information about a lot of the involved factors that matter.
By forcing people to collect those values, you force people to spend a lot of work to account for those values and try to get the accounting to look the way they want it to.
To raise $4.1 trillion in total taxes, the bureaucratic work was around $313 Billion. If you force people to report those TEMS all of those terms are likely similarly complex. The questions of how the numbers will be determined are also very complex so you will need a lot of lobbyists who fight over the values. You need lawyers to litigate cases where people cheated their numbers.
If you hire a plumber then the plumber has to know the TEMS values for all his equipment and know the rules for how much of that will apply to the job for which you hire him.
When thinking about the plastic bottle, we not only care about TEMS we care also how many of those plastic bottles will end up in the ocean and what effects they have in the ocean.
We care about the health effects of the substances in plastic. Both those that are already scientifically known as well as health impacts we haven’t yet researched.
In Ohio, a train derailment that might have very well in the supply chain of water bottles that were produced a lot of problems.
If you focus on TEMS you are going to ignore such effects. Ideally, there are taxes that price all the externalities into the price of the plastic bottle. It’s unclear to me why it would be good for actors to focus more on TEMS values.
You seem to assume that there’s a linear relationship between the intervention and the effect. This might be the case for cash transfers but it’s not the case for many other interventions.
If you give someone half of a betnet they are not 50% as much protected.
When it comes to medical treatments it might be that certain side effects only appear at a given dose and as a result you have to do your clinical trial for the dose that you actually want to put into the pill that you sell.
I was newly open to polyamory, and newly exposed to circling and saw something powerful and good about speaking truths even when they were uncomfortable.
From what you describe, it sounds to me like you didn’t really express truths when they were uncomfortable.
The truth was that you felt shame. It’s easier to be edgy and say “I have to masturbate before I see you” than to say “I feel ashamed of the attraction I have for you. I think I should masturbate so that I don’t get aroused by your presence before seeing you.”. Saying “I feel ashamed of the attraction I have for you” would be showing vulnerability. Probably, it would have made sense to share that feeling of shame about your attraction to her even earlier as at this point in time even the full version would have been too much.
The problem is that you neither followed the societal standards nor the standards of being radically honest about your experience.
I think we have good reason to believe the article is broadly right, even if some of the specific anecdotes don’t do a good job of proving this.
If someone invests a lot of effort into searching for good evidence and comes up empty that’s a signal for the availability of good evidence.
But it’s just hard to present evidence that conclusively proves
That leaves the question of why it’s hard. In plenty of communities, it’s easy to find a lot of women who were sexually touched without their consent.
The fact that the article suggests that this is very hard to find that in the EA community, suggests that something goes right.
“#MeToo urged society to ‘believe women;’ EAs tend to be a bit more skeptical.” (also seems true)
This seems to make it sound like society on average updated due to #MeToo to ‘believe women;’ and EAs didn’t. In reality, most of society didn’t update. I would expect that on average EA might even lean more toward ‘believe women;’ than the average person.
partly because there are many polyamorous people in the EA/rationalist communities; this creates an environment in which sexual misconduct may be addressed suboptimally.” This strikes me as totally plausible.
One thing that distinguishes polyamorous people is that they are more willing to talk about sexual conduct of other people than most other groups. That results in some people feeling bad because they hear about sexual conduct, but it also helps to police bad conduct.
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.