All of will_c's Comments + Replies

I think it's good to point out vegans who aren't careful can get nutritional deficiencies.

Seems like a lot (all?) of logistical issues could be fixed by just having a primary care physician who is willing to order these labs, which would probably be covered by insurance if you have symptoms (fatigue would count). I order them all the time as a physician in a primary care setting.

Most EA jobs I've seen offer health insurance, which usually includes a PCP.

Plus they can help with result interpretation, though GPT-4 does a pretty good job of that already.

I don't think that's correct. There's a recent study showing a reduction in mortality for prisoners that are incarcerated relative to a control group of people who were not incarcerated. It appears that most of the reduction in mortality is from reduction in overdose death risk but also a reduction in homicide. The implication is that people in prisons are safer than they would be outside. Probably most of the data showing otherwise comes from poorly done studies that don't use appropriate control groups, EG they may use the general population as control group relative to prisoners.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3644719

I strongly agree. I'm glad you wrote this post. I tweeted about this a few weeks ago. 

I have also had reasonable success in convincing normies that worrying about AI risk is sensible, or at least not crazy, in the last few months. Oddly enough, GPT-3 hasn't impressed people as much as DALLE-2, even though the former seems scarier/more capable to me. 

I have yet to bring it up in policy circles, but I think the Overton window on AI risk has widened quite a bit. 

I think it is an impressive effect, though I agree people not wanting to be in prison is more important. 

Using a panel of all defendants over the seven years after sentencing, we fnd that incarcerated defendants have a more than 60% lower mortality rate during the time of incarceration than similar defendants who were not incarcerated (an average of 230 deaths per hundred thousand annually as compared to 587 deaths per hundred thousand annually). The main sources of these differences are dramatically lower risks of mortality from homicide, overdose, o

I wonder if this paper, which appears to show that incarceration reduces prisoner mortality relative to non-incarcerted but criminal-justice-involved people, should change your estimates of CJ reform benefits. Given that, it seems plausible that reducing prison stays actually increases mortality for prisoners.

Another interesting thing about this paper is the implication that the previous work on this topic (which used the general population as the control group) was flawed in an obvious way. That should generally lower our opinion of the academic literature on this topic. 

That's an interesting idea. It seems like an effort that would require a lot of subject-matter expertise, so your idea to commision the CJ folks makes sense. 

I do wonder if cause areas that rely on academic fields which we have reason to believe may be ideologically biased would generally benefit from some red-teaming process. 

Excellent post. I have a strong prior that academic literature on criminology is biased, so I am more inclined than you to guess that consensus estimates for criminal justice reform not having net negative effects on crime are too optimistic. So my guess for second-order effects is that they make criminal justice reform even less valuable relative to other global health/wellness causes.

Putting that aside, I think one reason Open Phil might have been so favorably inclined to criminal justice reform was the bipartisan consensus that pursuing it was a good id... (read more)

missing something here

: "Peter Wildeford looks at the chances of accidental nuclear war (a), by giving the chance of a nuclear incident based on historical frequency using Laplace's law, and then his"

Another reason to doubt the infertility-->declining birth rate story is that some populations that live in similar environments have maintained very high fertility rates.

Ultra Orthodox Jews live close to other city dweller in the US, have high-ish levels of obesity (implying similar food environment to average westerner, which is a reason to think Amish living as farmers might be exempt), and have high fertility rates.

Also, there are some factors, like much better treatment of STDs, that should, all other things being equal, reduce infertility rates. Hi... (read more)

Incremental Institutional Review Board Reform

Epistemic Institutions, Values and Reflective Process

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) regulate biomedical and social science research. In addition to slowing and deterring life-saving biomedical research, IRBs interfere with controversial but useful social science research, eg, Scott Atran was deterred from studying Jihadi terrorists; Mark Kleiman was deterred from studying the California prison system, and a Florida State University IRB cited public controversy as a reason to deter research. We would like to ... (read more)

Replacing Institutional Review Boards with Strict Liability

Biorisk, Epistemic Institutions, Values and Reflective Process

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) regulate biomedical and social science research. As a result of their risk-averse nature, important biomedical research is slowed or deterred entirely; eg, the UK human challenge trial was delayed by several months because of a protracted ethics review process and an enrollment delay in a thrombolytics trial cost thousands of lives. In the US, a plausible challenge to IRB legality can be mounted on Firs... (read more)

Glad you didn't see any factual error in the posts!

#1, Yeah, you're totally right that "bioethicists" is the wrong target. Will try to use "institutionalized research ethics" going forward. It is much more explicit about what the problem is and more fair to bioethicists. 

re #2, sort of agreed. I tend to think the public doesn't like weird ideas in general, but there was a recent paper showing higher public support for challenge trials than traditional trials. So I'm not sure what counts as weird to the public as a whole. It might be the case that the public has surprisingly EA-ish ideas on medical ethics, at least on this specific issue. Not sure. 

I'm the author of the blogposts and tweets (@willyintheworld). You raise a bunch of good points and you're 100% right that when I write "bioethicists" on twitter I should really write "institutionalized research ethics". Not doing do so is sloppy of me. I think I do a better job showing the institutional dynamics bioethicists work under in my blogposts, so I think those hold up okay. But I'll look at those posts again and see if I think they need some edits. 

Mostly agree with: "worth some eyebrow-raising if it turns out that the ingroup defense ... (read more)

Interesting though not super important piece of information: Rabies is ~100% fatal once symptoms present, but there is evidence that even without vaccination, some humans have been exposed and survived, they just didn't realize it. 

I was about to post this. There are now two effective antivirals for COVID-19, developed relatively quickly, which makes me update towards antiviral development being a little easier and more promising than I thought. 

In addition, the historic antivirals with great success are against HIV and Hepatitis C and are targeted against a chronic disease. Herpes and CMV have antiviral treatments and are somewhat more acute (though Herpes is a chronic disease with acute flare-ups), but COVID-19 is more acute than those two. 

So my skepticism towards effective antivirals for acute illnesses is lower than before.

Hey, I'm working with Josh on an AMC project so I can answer this. 

 I don’t think it is actually a pessimistic paper for the pro-AMC case. The top-line result of “only 6 cents of additional R&D spending per dollar” is just part of the story. My summary of that paper:

1. Finkelstein finds large benefits (billions of dollars worth) from the increases in coverage paid for at only moderate (in the tens of millions $ range) cost. This is the “static benefit” of increasing vaccine coverage given the generally large benefits of higher vaccination rates.

It seems unlikely but not impossible given how strong status quo bias is among humans. NIMBY movement, reactionary and conservative politics in general, lots of examples of politics that call for less or no change. 

Humans have had periods of tens or hundreds of thousands of years where we stagnate and technology doesn't seem to change much, as far as we can tell from the archaeological record, so this isn't unprecedented. 

If Hanson thinks WBE and his resultant predictions are likely barring some external event or radical change, and also doesn't favor a Long Reflection, isn't that equivalent to saying his scenario is more desirable than the Long Reflection?

While Hanson is correct that the Long Reflection is rather dystopian, his alternatives are worse, and his "Age of EM" gives plenty of examples from a hypothetical society that is more dystopian than the "Long Reflection". 

Hanson's scenario of "a very real possibility that this regime could continue forever" is certainly worrying, but I view it as an improvement over certain alternatives, namely, AGI destroying humanity, severe values-drift from unconstrained whole brain emulation + editing + economic pressures, and resultant S-risk type scenarios.

So I... (read more)