Counterfactual means, that if something would not have happened something else would have happened. It's a key concept in Judea Pearl's work on causality. 

What makes you believe that Substack is to blame and not him unpublishing it?

He explicitly says that the people who argue that there's no gap are mistaken to argue that. He argues for the gap being small, not nonexistent. He does not use the term "near zero" himself. 

Similarly, there are a lot of people like Steve Sailer and Emil Kierkegaard arguing that there are racial gaps in intelligence, based on genetics. But when I read them on other stuff, they’re just not great thinkers. In contrast, while Jay M’s blog isn’t as popular or as fun to read for most people, he has a good piece arguing pretty convincingly against the genetic explanation of the gap.

The linked article says:

I do not believe that this is the important disagreement. Now, some (maybe even many) environmentalists argue that genetic differences play no role in the cognitive ability gap (e.g., Nisbett 2005), but I believe these environmentalists are mistaken to argue for such a strong position.

So the linked article says that Steve Sailer and Emil Kierkegaard are right when they say that there are racial gaps in intelligence based on genetics. Basically, he says there's a gap but wants to debate about its size.

Merchants were a lot weaker in China than in Europe. Chinese merchants also did a lot less sea voyages due to geography.

If a bunch of low-status merchants believed that the Earth is a sphere it might not have influenced Chinese high-class beliefs in the same way as beliefs of political powerful merchants in Europe.

Practicing grammar and correcting grammar on the fly seem to be two different things. 

If you want to improve, then I would prompt GPT-4 with something like "I'm a student looking to improve my writing and grammar ability, here's an essay I wrote. Given that writing, please teach me about grammar."

There are also people who's job it is to be a lot on the telephone and thus are well-reached by telephone even if they are younger.

They seem to have similar average BMI and the Swiss seem to have an even lower obesity rate. 

Belgium seems lower obesity rates than France but slightly higher average BMI.

Andorra has lower obesity rates but a significantly higher average BMI.

The UK, Spain and Germany are doing worse than France. 

A bit of chatting with Gemini suggests what Belgium, France and the Swiss share is a strong market culture so food is more fresh.

Eating a meal does not immediately increase the available amount of energy. After eating a meal the body has to first spent hours on processing the meal before the energy is available. 

If a hunter goes for a hunting trip they are usually eating the food after they did their hunting and not before starting their hunting trip. Our body is not optimized to at the same time sending a lot of blood to the intestines to gather resources and send the blood to the muscles for performance. 

But for anything that’s been studied in detail, there’s always lots of evidence to support any semi-plausible view. Do you have any idea how much evidence people can produce for UFOs or chronic Lyme or colloidal silver?

To me, the colloidal silver situation feels strange. It seems that it was used as an antibiotic in the past but we don't have good studies that tell us whether or not it works as an antibiotic. If there would be good evidence that it doesn't work it would likely be on the Wikipedia page.

Health authorities warn about the dangers of antibiotic resistance and how important it supposedly is to have new antibiotics that work through different mechanisms. At the same time, they don't fund the studies to see whether colloidal silver works as an antibiotic, probably out of some combination of it not being patentable and otherwise being a low-status idea.

For most practical purposes, if I need an antibiotic I would rather use one with a well-understood risk profile, so using colloidal silver as a home treatment seems a bad idea.

In what sense did the BSL levels failed consistently or catastrophically?

Even if you think COVID-19 is a lab leak, the BSL levels would have suggested that the BSL 2 that Wuhan used for their Coronavirus gain-of-function research is not enough. 

It seems like the US military would be the ideal institution to study this. They could effectively control the diets of soldiers, where diet control is usually a problem for most studies.

Historically, the US military is also quite willing to fund research theses that mainstream academia despises like NLP's Fast Phobia cure helping soldiers with PTSD. 

In Germany, we are talking about building pipelines for hydrogen transport. Would those hydrogen tubes dual use so that you can transport a lot of hydrogen with them as well?

You can make an argument that current dating apps aren't metaverse-based but that doesn't mean that this is an inherent feature of dating apps. https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/03/match-group-details-plans-for-a-dating-metaverse-tinders-virtual-goods-based-economy/ sounds to me like something everyone would call metaverse.

Cryptopeople never succeeded in convincing a general population that owning expensive NFT is a positive signal. It was maybe perceived as a positive signal for a few nerds but saying "I payed 100k for an NFT" at a date was for most women more a signal for bad judgement than a positive signal.

They also lacked a way to get the NFT displayed automatically in social interactions, the way a virtual good in a dating app can be displayed. 

Virtual worlds make it easy to display virtual goods during social interactions. If the social interactions within the virtal world are high stakes then users are okay with paying more to increase their status in the virtual world.

I'm not 100 percent sure but I think I heard about the Chinese example from the early days of WeChat and it was the first business model that really worked for them.

In the Chinese example, signaling wealth was a very useful signal and thus that worked in a straightforward way.

If you on the other hand, have a virtual LessWrong conference (and currently such a thing is even planned) then I don't primarily care about the wealth of people I'm speaking with. If some users on the other hand had a badge that they could have only brought if they were at a CFAR workshop, I might be inclined to be more likely to chat with people who have the CFAR badge.

At a virtual EA global conference, EA charities could sell virtual goods that participants could then wear. I would expect that it would be a positive status signal at a virtual EA global conference if someone wears a virtual good that they brought for 100,000 dollar from AMF. People at EA global are th Bere for professional networking and the fact that someone essentially donated that money to AMF is a sign that they are a valuable person to network with.

Different virtual world events will have different qualities that are worthy to signal and you are going to have similar dynamics as meatspace fashion being an "insider" can mean that you know how to signal to other "insiders" that you are an insider by chosing the virtual goods you wear.

The kind of people who put Black Lives Matter on their twitter profile, might buy a Black Lives Matter virtual T-Shirt that's sold by the Black Lives Matter foundation. Then you also have marketing agencies that will pay influencers to wear certain virtual goods and in some scenarios that will make it a good social signal to wear the current goods that the influencers wear. It's all about how much signaling matters within the virtual world. 

A lot of the reason why Second Life isn't a big part of the economy is that Second Life doesn't matter in general. It has few users and little social significance.

In China you had dating apps where people could signal their wealth by buying the most expensive virtual good available. The number I found via google is USD 67.5 billion as the global virtual goods market in 2021.

People pay a lot of money for luxury fashion items. Whether those have a physical representation isn't the main point.

I think a (slightly cartoony) real life example is servants. Rich people today are richer than rich people in Victorian times, but fewer rich people today (in developed countries) can afford to have servants.

It's not really a question of developed countries. Singapore is a developed country and it's much cheaper to hire servants over there. 

Western ideas of equality and migration policy are what's making servants more expensive.

It seems like the technology you would want is one where you can get one Adderal box immediately but not all Adderal boxes that the store has at the premises.

Essentially, a big vending machine that might have 10 minutes to unlock to restock the vending machine but that can only give up one Adderal box per five minutes in its vending machine mode.

Now, surely some of that time is partially recaptured by e.g. people doing their shopping while waiting

That sounds like the technique might encourage customers to buy non-prescription medication in the pharmacy along with the prescription medicine they want to buy.

Even when the acetaldehyde itself increase oral cancer, parodontitis also increases oral cancer rates. While Lumina won't completely removes parodontitis, reduced pardontitis might reduce oral cancer rates in the same amount as the increased acetaldehyde increases it resulting in net zero effect. 

As far as this particular paper goes I just searched for one on the point in Google Scholar. 

I'm not sure what you believe about Spencer Greenberg but he has two interviews with people who believe that therapist skills (where empathy is one of the academic findings) matter:

https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/070/scott-miller-why-does-psychotherapy-work-when-it-works-at-all/

https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/192/david-burns-cognitive-behavioral-therapy-and-beyond/

Even if it reduces it a bit, there's no good reason to assume that it causes immunity.

Lumina is about replacing Streptococcus mutans while leaving Lactobacillus alone. Streptococcus mutans lives on dental tissue while Lactobacillus lives on the gum. Both produce lactic acid.

We see it reflected in RCTs. One aspect of therapist quality is for example therapist empathy and empathy is a predictor for treatment outcomes. 

The style of therapy does not seem to be important according to RCTs but that doesn't mean that therapist skill is irrelevant. 

Edit: Game Theory suggests that you should never engage in therapy or at least never with someone with available time, at least until someone invents the certified pre-owned market.

That would be prediction-based medicine. It works in theory, it's just that someone would need to put it into practice. 

One aspect of having many small projects is that it makes it harder to see the whole picture. It obfuscates and makes public criticism harder. 

If someone builds a Ministery of Truth it's easy to criticize it as an Orwellian attack on liberal democracy. If they instead distribute it over hundreds of different organizations, it's a lot harder to conceptualize. 

Defending liberal democracy is complex, because everyone wants to say that they are on the side of liberal democracy.

If you take the Verified Voting Foundation as one of the examples of highly recommended projects in the link, mainstream opinion these days is probably that their talking points are problematic because people might trust less in elections when the foundations speaks about the need for a more trustworthy election process. 

While I personally believe that pushing for a more secure voting system is good, it's a complex situation and many other projects in the space are similar. It's easy for a project that's funded for the purpose of strengthening liberal democracy to do the opposite. 

Minsk really much feels the same way.

The key aspect of Minsk was that it was not put into practice. The annexation of Austria by Germany was fully put into practice and accepted by other states. 

From the perspetive of democracies it seems kinda reasonable to try one time a peaceful resolution accepting a conquest and see if Putin stops

Ukraine didn't try. They didn't pass the laws that Minsk called for. They did pass laws to discriminate against the Russian-speaking population. They said that they wanted to retake Crimea sooner or later. Ukraine never accepted losing any territory to Russia. 

I expect many reasons to invade other adjacent countries to come up aswell.

I don't see why we should ignore reasons. Georgia seems to be willing to produce reasons to be invaded. Maybe, Georgia shouldn't pass such laws? If you are worried about being invaded under the pretext of removing civil rights, maybe not remove civil rights?

I don't think any of the EU countries that border Russia have a situation that's remotely similar in either reasons to invade or in ability to launch a promising invasion against them by Russia.

Why Putin probably won't stop with Ukraine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsk_agreements

How do you draw that conclusion from the Minsk agreements? In those, Ukraine committed to pass laws for Decentralisation of power, including through the adoption of the Ukrainian law "On temporary Order of Local Self-Governance in Particular Districts of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts". Instead of Decentralization they passed laws forbidding those districts from teaching children in the languages that those districts wants to teach them. 

Ukraines unwillingness to follow the agreements was a key reason why the invasion in 2022 happened and was very popular with the Russian population. Being in denial about that is not helpful is you want to help prevent wars from breaking out.

Having maximalist foreign policy goals is not the way you get peace. 

This creates a new global equilibrium where the US is no longer powerful enough to disincentivize all authoritarians regime from grabbing more land etc.

The latest illegal land grab was done by Israel without any opposition by the US. If you are truly worried about land grabs being a problem why not speak against that US position of being okay with some land grabs instead of just speaking for buying more weapons?

Specifically, the wrong thing was not that he climbed the mountain without any safety equipment, but the fact that he realized that it was dangerous!

That does not seem like a good summary. He knew beforehand that it was dangerous and knew it afterhand. The problem that was him not being focused on climbing while pursuing a goal where being focused on climbing is important to be successful. 

But it still feels that the lesson could be summarized as: "talk like everyone outside the rationalist community does all the time".

No. People not listening to other people and instead thinking about what they will say next is something that normal people frequently do. 

You need to send some Starships to get down to the surface on Mars but you could likely do that job with a handful of starships. You don't need to produce 1000 starships per year to do that. 

Elon's idea of building a thousand Starships per-year to get to Mars seems ill-thought-out. 

Starship is very well designed for bringing objects into orbit and down from orbit but not for the interplanetary journey.

For the interplanetary journey, you likely want to have a ring-space-station that's propelled by ion thrusters. 

Having a ring-space-station means that it's easy to produce artificial gravity and generally have the infrastructure to have a good journey for more people. 

If you look at Western values like freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or minority rights Ukrainian policy in the last decade was about trampling on those values.

The Venice Commission told Ukraine that they have to respect minority rights if they want to be in the EU. Ukraine still passed laws to trample minority rights. 

No Western military lets their soldiers get away with wearing Nazi symbols the way the Ukrainian military does. That has something to do with different values as well. 

Ukrainians certainly want to share in the benefits of what the Western world and the EU provide, but that doesn't mean that they share all the values.

If someone is rate-limited because their posts are perceived as low quality, and they write a comment ahead of time, it's good when they reread that comment before posting. If the process of posts from the queue getting posted is automatic that doesn't happen the same way than when someone has their queue in their Google Doc (or whatever way the use to organize their thoughts) for copy-pasting.

I asked this question because I believed that it very common for LW parties to specifically want to exclude people on philosophical grounds.

Whether or not someone wants you dead or not is not a difference on "philosophical grounds". 

Even when it comes to cars, there are plenty of French protests where tractors are used to block roads. You don't see similar blockages in the US and when you saw it in Canada their premier was essentially claiming dictatorship powers for himself to fight the protests.

The core reason for holding the belief is because the world does not look to me like there's little low hanging fruit in a variety of domains of knowledge I have thought about over the years. Of course it's generally not that easy to argue for the value of ideas that the mainstream does not care about publically.

Wei Dei recently wrote:

I find it curious that none of my ideas have a following in academia or have been reinvented/rediscovered by academia (including the most influential ones so far UDT, UDASSA, b-money). Not really complaining, as they're already more popular than I had expected (Holden Karnofsky talked extensively about UDASSA on an 80,000 Hour podcast, which surprised me), it just seems strange that the popularity stops right at academia's door. 

If you look at the broader field of rationality, the work of Judea Pearl and that of Tetlock both could have been done twenty years earlier. Conceptually, I think you can argue that their work was some of the most important work that was done in the last decades.

Judea Pearl writes about how allergic people were against the idea of factoring in counterfactuals and causality. 

My guess would be that one difference of French politics compared to US politics is that offline actions like protests where people take physical actions are a bit more central to French politics than in US politics.

Given that they had engineered viruses in the lab at biosafety level II, why do you think the most likely version of the lab leak scenario does not involve an engineered virus?

Novel research is inherently illegible. If it were legible, someone else would have already pursued it.

It might also be that a legible path would be low status to pursue in the existing scientific communities and thus nobody pursues it.

If you look at a low-hanging fruit that was unpicked for a long time, airborne transmission of many viruses like the common cold, is a good example. There's nothing illegible about it.

King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine is the classic reading  recommendation for archetypes. 

It's worth separating what people actually believe about how altruistic other people are from what they pretend to believe about the altruism of other people. 

If you ask someone whether they believe that there's a chance that their partner would cheat on them, they are most likely to tell you that their partner would cheat on them. The same person might take a few signs that point in the direction of their partner cheating as a huge problem.

I would also expect that beliefs differ a lot between people.

I know someone, who was working at a company that does food testing in Germany. 

When it comes to pesticides, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) set maximum amounts, German authorities set more stringent rules on the allowed pesticides and then German supermarkets overperform by requiring even stronger limits. 

On the other hand, the standard techniques that are used to pick up contaminants in food do not pick up microplastics. There are no official limits exposed by EFSA for microplastics. 

If you think that low-effort good spectrometers will give you good information about microplastics pollution or poisoning attempts by skilled attackers, I think you overrate what you could detect that way. 

Theranos was built on the idea that you can detect a lot if you combine microfluid technology alone with spectrometers and they failed despite investing significant research money.

While in theory, you can easily motivate people in politics with money, it tends to corrupt the process. 

If you look at what happens in student self-governance, people usually aren't doing it because they are motivated by money but by ideas.

You have people who are motivated by ideas of inclusion and equity. It's not because those people direct subsides or direct payments but because their belief in the ideas and they get esteem from their peers for persuing those ends.

To make real progress at governance you would need people who primarily care about governance.  

The idea about the American Antarctic base or a governing a village both require a decent amount of political capital to start. 

You would need someone who's both interpersonal skilled, intellectually curious and cares about governance as his most important political end. From there you can start with getting involved in various different government efforts. Then blog about it and provide advice for other people who need to create governance for the institutions they create. 

I just don't see the feasibility in accounting for a practice effect when retaking the IQ test is also directly linked to the increased score you're bound to get.

How do you think controlled experiments work?

Yes, he realizes and it would have been easy for you to know by reading. He had a control group that also took IQ tests to factor out training effects. 

There are many organizations that need governance that most of the time still are not interested in experimenting with governance.

If you for example take student self-representation at universities, the structures are very similar in every US university because nobody really cares about experimenting with them. People have other priorities then experimenting with new governance systems. 

To calculate probabilities you need to define terms very clearly. "(we are in a 2nd cold war)? is a vague claim where the terms are not clearly enough defined for probabilities. 

That sounds like it made sense at the beginning but now the data set should be large enough that a higher dimensional approach would be better?

I'm surprised that it's one-dimensional as that should be relatively easy for the game. If the attacker cares about promoting Israeli interests or Chinese interests they can just cast a lot of votes in the other right/left direction on topics they don't care about. 

Did they write anywhere why they only consider one-dimension?

Because it looks like you haven't explored the assumptions you make well.

If I have a discussion about poker and the person who I ask something about poker has no interests to continue to talk to me about poker I have a variety of ways to increase my knowledge about poker. I might read a book about poker. 

In your last question, someone told you to read the sequences. If you want to understand how discourse is seen on LessWrong that was a good suggestion.

See https://web.archive.org/web/20230505191204/https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5Jmhdun9crJGAJGyy/why-are-we-so-complacent-about-ai-hell for longer previous discussion on it.

Can you give more concrete examples of where you used it?