But I have observed this all directly. 

This post feels like it's written on an unnecessarily high level of abstraction. What are the actual events you observed directly? What did you see with your own eyes or hear with your own ears?

Did you do any targeted work to change beliefs while under the influence of drugs?

Especially, processes like belief reporting or internal double cruxt that were facilitated by another person?

Elizabeth wrote in Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow about how it's good to have pursue goals with good feedback loops to stay aligned.

It seems to me like SecureBio focusing on a potential pandemic is a goal where the feedback loop is worse than if you would focus on the normal variation in viruses. Knowing which flu viruses and coronaviruses varients are the the most common and growing the most, seems like straightforward problem that could be solved by NAObservatory. 

What's the core reason why the NAObservatory currently doesn't provide that data and when in the future would you expect that kind of data to be easily accessible from the NAObservatory website?

If Biden pardons people like Fauci for crimes like perjury, that would set a bad precedent.

There's a reason why perjury is forbidden and if you just give pardons to any government official who committed crimes at the end of an administration that's a very bad precedent.

One way out of that would be to find a different way to punish government criminals when they are pardoned. One aspect of a pardon is that they remove the Fifth Amendment defense. 

You can subpoena pardoned people in front of Congress and ask them under oath to speak about all the crimes they committed that they can't be prosecuted for because of the pardon. Then you can charge them for any lies where they didn't volunteer information about pardoned crimes they committed. 

Just keeping yourself vertical enough to walk requires constant dynamic tension (this can be easily tested by getting smashingly drunk).

That's a bad test for the hypothesis. Getting drunk makes coordination harder with makes it hard to work. At the same time it doesn't fully relax all muscles. 

If you want to know how much muscle tension is required for a given muscle, the much better test would to go to a Alexander Technique teacher who trained to do that movement with minimal muscle tension and see how much muscle tension they exert.

Here’s an idea: What if when you have a feeling in your body, sometimes it’s there for others to see? What if feelings use the body as a display?

That framing sounds dualistic and as if feelings are somehow separate from the body, so that they could be displayed by the body.

Evolutionary the main job of brains is to coordinate movement. Trauma responses like fight, flight and freeze express themselves in movement not because it's beneficial to display them in the body but because movement is required to effectively respond. 

If you truly want to understand what goes on, it's also important to be conscious of tension being possible to by held by fascia in addition to being held directly by muscle tension. 

Keeping muscles tensed makes you ready to move. 

How would that work? Muscle movement happens through changing a muscle from being untensed to the tensed state. You have more potential to move when your muscles are relaxed. 

I do think plenty of rationalists invested into crypto since then. While 20x is a lot, it's not as big as what was possible beforehand and there are also other investments like Tesla stock that have been 20x since 2018 (and you had a LessWrong post arguing that people should invest into Tesla before it spiked). 

Nvidia is even 30x over that timeframe.  

Okay, my statement as far as "no trials" was imprecise, I did explicitly talk about the COVID-19 trials, so I did grant that there are trials that happen. The just don't happen for most vaccines as most vaccines are controlled against previously licensed vaccines. 

Because it's an incredibly rare side-effect 

A quick search suggests 1/10000 as a current official number. Do you consider 1/10000 incredibly rare?

I've never made any claims about "absolute safety". 

People who want to decide whether or not to take a vaccine care about absolute safety and not about relative safety between different vaccines. 

Sure, they are "unsafe" in the way that any action or inaction is nominally "unsafe".

They are unsafe in a way that warrants their producers being held not liable for the damages caused by them to set incentives to minimize damages. The assumption here is that the cost of paying for an insurance policy that adequately pays for the damage is too high to burden the producers of vaccines with it. 

There are few cases where we say as a society that things are so risky that we need to shield a company from the harm that their products might produce. 

There's a reason that prediction markets are popular on LessWrong. They are a tax on bullshit. A requirement to have insurance policies is in the same way a tax on bullshit. "Unavoidably unsafe" is about unwillingness to pay that tax. 

The medically relevant question is whether a new drug or therapy is safe and effective relative what what we are already doing.

That's relevant for people who want to decide about whether to take the old or the new vaccine. To the person who wants to make a decision between taking no vaccine at all or the new vaccine, evidence that compares the new vaccine against no vaccine is relevant. 

__________

But let's focus more on the meat of the issue. What makes you confident that the current system is effective at finding all side-effects that exist of vaccines? 

Is it that you decided beforehand that "distrust of scientists" is bad and therefore you trust the output of the system? Otherwise, what process did you went through to develop your trust that this particular system works very well? 

This isn't about liking or disliking RFK Jr

If you care about evidence, how about starting with acknowledging that the answer to your first question about why one would believe RFK Jr is that because he's factually correct with the claim that no randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trials for vaccines are run?

You seem to have had a false belief that needs updating, and if you just gloss over that, that's not good reasoning. 

The key question is about what policy you want. Given what RFK Jr. said, it's likely that the policy he is going to advocate is some form of a requirement of randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trials for vaccines.

Currently, the reasoning of why there's no randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trials for vaccines has nothing to do with evidence-based reasoning but with a mix of a certain medical ethics and pharma lobbying. 

Meaning it was proven to be safe and effective against a placebo and, therefore, is the new standard. 

Safe is a relative term and you are using the term "proof" quite losely. 

Vaccines are by law unavoidably unsafe, which is the legal justification from the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Act for giving the producers immunity from lawsuits over the vaccines. The whole idea at that time is that vaccines have some side effects but the benefits outweigh the risks. The vaccines from that era are the one's that are used in the controlled studies. HHS did not follow the law to report on the progress on how vaccines got more safe after that in the way the act requires.

In medicine, it frequently happens that drugs have side-effects that were not picked up in initial clinical trials, so obviously if you follow evidence-based reasoning, a trial does not proof anything absolutely safe. As a relevant recent example, the increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis from mRNA Covid-19 vaccines was not picked up by the placebo-controlled trials that they ran. 

evidence-based reasoning instead of his distrust of scientists

Distrust of scientist was part of the motto of the Royal Society. When studying bioinformatics one of my professors made a point to say something in every lecture to foster our distrust. The replication crisis of the last decade was inherently about distrust of scientists and one of the greatest things that happened to science in that timeframe.

Saying scientists who are not running enough placebo-controlled trials should be distrusted, is an evidence-based argument. Ideally, there would be meta-science that better tells us when we need to to run placebo-controlled trials and when we don't but the NIH under past leadership did not like to fund that meta-science. 

Policy-wise, I think that focusing on standards of evidence is the most likely choice he could make as HHS secretary because he's unlikely able to just declare certain vaccines he doesn't like to be off-the-shelves. 

So if you want an evidence-based discussion it makes sense to focus on the merits and costs of placebo-controlled trials.

Mind-body dualism does not exist. Emotions show themselves in the body and can be perceptible to other people. 

If you want to understand better how other people feel and are motivated doing a lot of Circling where people express what they feel is a good step to expose yourself to relevant information.

Being obstinate makes you more prone to motivated cognition. 

One problematic aspect is that it's often easier to avoid motivated reasoning when the stakes are low. Even if you manage to avoid it in 95% of the cases, if th remaining 5% are there what really matters you are still overall screwed.

While I agree in principle that there are often better ways to get the necessary information than the scientific method, I'm not sure that I meet someone who from whom I know that they actually applies the scientific method too much. And I have spent a lot of time with rationalists and organizing Quantified Self meetups. 

Have you meet people who were using the scientific method too much? If so, what did those people do?

Congress does have leadership that's separate from the president. People like Nancy Pelosi have political power. 

You also have a lot of other organizations. Organizations like the Chamber of Commerce can drive legislative change as well. 

If you don't think it relates to the question at hand, why did you brought up the point in the first place?

I think you are too much focused on Trump (likely because the media likes to focus on Trump) and not on how a successful campaign to repeal the act would look like. It's unlikely that Trump makes it his agenda, but that's not required given that the legislature is independent from the executive.

Trump's recent demand that the US Senate should confirm his appointees via recess appointments, similarly really does not strike me as Trump caring about what party elites think.

Trump made that demand and John Thune became Senate majority leader without making a clear promise to appoint all candidates via recess appointments. 

Elites already managed to prevent the pro-antitrust, pro-Snowden pardon appointment of Matt Gaetz and replace him with a more conventional Republican that's less likely to go after corporate power and other elite interests.

I also have a pure EAA protein powder which is entirely fermented and have a balanced amino acid profile. These are generally very poorly marketed supplements but they are widely available.

What's the name under which the protein powder is sold?

Most politics is not top down from the president. If Trump would care about repealing the act he could do it, but it's unlikely a topic he cares very much about.

If you want change, you likely need to convince congressional Republicans. I would expect that such congressman have a reasonable fear of being attacked for going against "America First" if they would move to repeal the Jones Act.

If DOGE would want to get rid of it, they would need to convince congressmen. There are likely a lot of laws that would be easier for them to target with the political capital they have.

There's a question of how much of the iodine goes to the thyroid and that might produce side effects. On the other hand, the salt water might also have side effects. Do you have reason to believe the salt water to have negligible side effects?

If you promote "diversity" then you have not only take in mind what you mean with it, but also how policy is likely going to work in practice. 

In practice, there are some dimensions that are easy to measure like race and gender. There are other dimensions that are harder to measure. Some dimensions are also not conducive to research progress. Researchers with IQ under a hundred are underrepresented in grant giving.

Then there are variables like vaccination status, where being unvaxxed does not result in you having a worse ability to do research in the same way as having a lower IQ but there are perspectives on medical research that will correlate with vaccination status. 

If your policy tries to increase the representation of unvaxxed researchers, that might be threatening to hegemonic beliefs and thus a research bureaucracy likely prefers increasing representation of minority races that are unlikely to threaten any hegenomic beliefs. 

If you don't specify the dimensions, the dimensions that are going to selected are most likely those that don't threaten hegemony of current opinions and thus the dimensions that are least likely to actually matter for diversity of ideas and the selected dimensions might even be chosen to strengthen the hegemony of the existing ideas. 

If you actually want real diversity by doing things like calling for diversity in vaccination status you should do that explicitly. 

One big political problem is that Trump campaigned on "Make in America" so, convincing Republicans under his watch of just replacing the Jones Act is hardly possible.

Maybe the policy positions should be: "Tariffs are great if you want 'Make in America', repeal the Jones Act and replace it with a 100% tariff on foreign build ships (with the president having the ability to change the tariff as needed)". 

If you decrease ship costs from 4-5x to 2x of what it costs outside of the US, you might still get a renaissance of ships and you have a bunch of money that you can use to pay off people. 

I assume salt water has lower side effects, so that seemed like a promising thing to check.

Why do you make that assumption? Besides the antiviral effect of it, I would expect salt water to drain H_2O from the oral mucosa. Do you think the effect is too small to matter? Do you think it's a desirable effect?

Wikipedia currently writes "Epstein installed concealed cameras in numerous places on his properties to allegedly record sexual activity with underage girls of prominent people for criminal purposes such as blackmail."

This suggests that more than one underage girl was passed around. The fact that the others don't have the same courage as Virginia Giuffre to speak publically about it, does not mean that there wasn't a problem. 

It does show that the system to suppress information about it is working well, which is also shown by the fact that the FBI did not lose that video stack as material for prosecuting all those people. 

I submit that this industry in particular does not exist, or at least would be a terrible way to make money on a risk-adjusted basis compared to drug dealing.

The blackmail potential existing matters in addition to being directly paid. J. Edgar Hoover could be effectively blackmailed by the mafia into saying that there's no mafia by having photos of his homosexual activities, but these days that wouldn't be enough to blackmail anybody. 

Understanding how organizations like Epsteins operate is hard because they do everything they can to avoid being well understood.

As far as industry goes, it's quite old but https://wikileaks.org/wiki/an_insight_into_child_porn is a good read about how child pornography worked two decades ago. It's not the same as child prostitution but it's a good article about ground realities. 

If you disagree with the question, why answer deep in the comments of one answer than at the top level?

My friends were a good deal sharper and more motivated at 18 than now at 25. 

How do you tell that there were sharper back then?

But surely most people realize that it would be very hard for an organized child rape cabal to spread word about their offerings to customers without someone alerting police.

Epstein seemed to run something like an organized child rape cabal and most people involved in it didn't go to prison.

The current establishment position is that it's unethical to run randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trials for vaccines if there's already an existing vaccine on the market that targets a given illness. Instead, new vaccines for illnesses with existing vaccines get tested against an existing vaccine. In practice, most of the commonly used childhood vaccines in the United States fall under that category.

Those are just the basic facts of the issue whether or not you like RFK Jr. The more interesting question is about whether his policy demand of requiring randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trials for each vaccine is one that should be adopted or not. And if it gets adopted what happens with existing vaccines that fail that standard. 

If that's your theory of change, how do you think that communication should work? Who could be tasked with creating the right communication so that it will work?

If a product derives from Federally-funded research, the government owns a share of the IP for that product.

How would you do that in practice? Is it a matter of adding a standard paragraph to NIH grants?

Readers from backgrounds like mine may balk at "diversity" as an explicit benefit; however, diversity is vital to properly exploring the hypothesis space without the bias imposed by limited perspectives.

There are different kinds of diversity. 

It seems to me like the decision of the Ida Rolf Foundation to start funding research had good downstream effects that we see in recent advances in understanding fascia. That foundation being able to fund things that the NHI wouldn't fund was important. Getting a knowledge community like the Rolfers included in academic researchers is diversity that produces beneficial research outcomes.

If you follow standard DEI criteria, it doesn't help you with a task like integrating the Rolfing perspective. It doesn't get you to fund a white man like Robert Schleip. 

I would suspect that coming from a background of economic poverty means that you likely have less slack that you can use to learn about knowledge communities besides the mainstream academic community. Having the time to spent in relevant knowledge communities, seems to me like a sign of economic privilege. 

Maybe, you could get something relevant by focusing on diversity of illness burden within your researcher community as people with chronic illnesses might have spent a lot of time acquiring knowledge that produces useful perspectives, but I doubt that standard DEI criteria get you there. 

To the extent that our needs are "actively shoot ourselves in the foot slightly less often", there's the question of why we currently shoot ourselves in the food. I suspect it's because of the incentives that are produced by the current policies. 

Saying "whatever ways are reasonable" is ignoring the key issues.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believes that all vaccines should require placebo-blind trials to be licensed the most other drugs do. 

Whether or not that's reasonable is the key question.

Beyond that, a major health problem is obesity and here semaglutide seems like it would help a lot.

Do you believe that Medicaid/Medicare should just pay the sticker price for everyone who wants it?

Surely the state of the science has advanced since this lawsuit took place.

Yes, it does. We now have meta reviews which were not common back in 1990.

Cochrane is one of the best sources for metastudies and their read of the scientific evidence for chiropractics is: "The review shows that while combined chiropractic interventions slightly improved pain and disability in the short term and pain in the medium term for acute and subacute low-back pain, there is currently no evidence to support or refute that combined chiropractic interventions provide a clinically meaningful advantage over other treatments for pain or disability in people with low-back pain."

While it's not shown to be superior to conventional treatment it's also not shown to be without effect. Given that insurance covers a variety of treatments for back pain that are just as effective as chiropractics, the AMA has been essentially shown wrong. 

To me, it's quite strange to advocate "Don't Dismiss on Epistemics" while at the same time ignoring scientific meta reviews on the topic.

I simply find it interesting that people feel the need to justify their terminal goals (unless they are emotions), and that the only way they can seem to do it is by associating it with an emotion.

I don't find it surprising that when you ask people "Why do you want that?", they feel pressure to justify themselves. That seems to me the basic way normal human beings reject to social inquiries. If you ask "Why X" normal people feel pressured to provide a justification. 

Yes, most people are generally bad at updating. That has nothing to do with whether or not someone is a libertarian. 

The reason Zvi is surprised comes downstream of numerical literacy and not downstream of him being libertarian-leaning. 

28% percent increase suggests that more than one in five go bankrupt because of sports online gambling (which would be a subset of gambling in general).

If I ask Claude for the top five reasons people go bankrupt in the US in 2023 I get:

1. Medical Debt

2. Job Loss/Income Reduction

3. Credit Card/Consumer Debt

4. Divorce/Family Issues

5. Housing Market Issues/Mortgage Debt

ChatGPT gives me:

Loss of Income

Medical Expenses

Unaffordable Mortgages or Foreclosures

Overspending and Credit Card Debt

Providing Financial Assistance to Others

I think Claude and ChatGPT do summarize the common wisdom about what normal people believe about what the most important factors for bankruptcy happen to be and that does not include gambling (let alone sports online gambling specifically). If you ask a normal person for the top five reasons they would likely come up with a similar list that does not mention sports online betting. 

Most people don't have very fixed ideas about how much a 28% overall increase in bankruptcy happens to be. 

If you would ask most people without a libertarian outlook to rank different factors that lead to an increase in bankruptcy, I would not expect them to be able to accurately compare them and find that sports online gambling only will have such a strong influence. 

I would add that convincing Musk to take action against Altman is the highest ROI thing I can think of in terms of decreasing AI extinction risk.

I would expect, the issue isn't about convincing Musk to take action but about finding effective actions that Musk could take. 

The United States has laws that prevent the US intelligence and defense agencies from spying on their own population. The Snowden revelations showed us that the US intelligence and defense agencies did not abide by those limits. 

Facebook has a usage policy that forbids running misinformation campaigns on their platform. That did not stop US intelligence and defense agencies from running disinformation campaigns on their platform.

Instead of just trusting contracts, Antrophics could add oversight mechanisms, so that a few Antrophics employees can look over how the models are used in practice and whether they are used within the bounds that Antrophics expects them to be used in. 

If all usage of the models is classified and out of reach of checking by Antrophics employees, there's no good reason to expect the contract to be limiting US intelligence and defense agencies if those find it important to use the models outside of how Antrophics expects them to be used.

For example, with carefully selected government entities, we may allow foreign intelligence analysis in accordance with applicable law. All other use restrictions in our Usage Policy, including those prohibiting use for disinformation campaigns, the design or use of weapons, censorship, domestic surveillance, and malicious cyber operations, remain.

This sounds to me like a very carefully worded nondenail denail. 

If you say that one example of how you can break your terms is to allow a select government entity to do foreign intelligence analysis in accordance with applicable law and not do disinformation campaigns, you are not denying that another example of how you could do expectations is to allow disinformation campaigns. 

If Antrophics would be sincere in this being the only expectation that's made, it would be easy to add a promise to Exceptions to our Usage Policy, that Anthropic will publish all expectations that they make for the sake of transparency. 

Don't forget, that probably only a tiny number of Anthropic employees have seen the actual contracts and there's a good chance that those are build by classification from talking with other Anthropics employees about what's in the contracts. 

At Antrophics you are a bunch of people who are supposed to think about AI safety and alignment in general. You could think of this as a testcase of how to design mechanisms for alignment and the Exceptions to our Usage Policy seems like a complete failure in that regard, because it neither contains mechanism to make all expectations public nor any mechanisms to make sure that the policies are followed in practice.

AlphaFold doesn't come out of academia. That doesn't make it non-scientific. As Feymann said in his cargo-cult science speech, plenty of academic work is not properly tested. Being peer-reviewed doesn't make something scientific. 

Conceptually, I think you are making a mistake when you treat ideas and experiments as the same and equate the probability of an experiment finding a result as the same as the idea being true. Finding a good experiment to do to test an idea is nontrivial. 

A friend of mine was working in a psychology lab and according to my friend the professor leading the lab was mostly trying to p-hack her way into publishing results. 

Another friend, spoke approvingly of the work of the same professor because the professor managed to get Buddhist ideas into academic psychology and now the official scientific definition of the term resembles certain Buddhist notions. 

The professor has a well-respected research career in her field. 

CFAR's approach to the problem was internal double crux. If internal parts disagree and have different beliefs, internal double crux is a way to align them.

Leverage Research developed with Belief Reporting another approach to deal with the issue. 

While that tweet says good things about his relationship with truth, his defense of talking about immigrants eating cats and dogs because constituents told him without checking whether or not that's true was awful.

Maybe, we felt like he needed to do it because of political pressure and felt dirty doing it, but it was still awful by rationalist standards.  

I think there's a good chance that JDVance is better than the average US politician, but there's no good reason to see him as a rationalist. 

Why would you trust CSIS here? A US think tank like that is going to seek to publically say that invading Taiwan is bad for the Chinese.

Given that the Supreme Court upheld the Voting Rights Act of 1965, state legislatures aren't able to do just whatever they want without limits. 

What those limits would be in a particular case, is something you will only find out when had a few legal battles. 

Nothing in that announcement suggests that this is limited to intelligence analysis. 

U.S. intelligence and defense agencies do run misinformation campaigns such as the antivaxx campaign in the Philippines, and everything that's public suggests that there's not a block to using Claude offensively in that fashion.

If Anthropic has gotten promises that Claude is not being used offensively under this agreement they should be public about those promises and the mechanisms that regulate the use of Claude by U.S. intelligence and defense agencies. 

There are different ways you can define a term. You can define a term like depression as being about certain neurological mechanisms or you can define it as whether a psychiatrist labels it as depression. The DSM is famously neutral about mechanisms and just cares about a list of symptoms as accessed by the subjective judgement of a psychiatrist.

I think that's the DSM having that perspective is holding back progress at dealing with mental illnesses.  While I think the DSM doesn't directly have a definition for traumaI would expect that it would be good to have nonsubjective definitions for trauma as well. 

When it comes to Buddhist practice, it's worth noting that practicing techniques by the book is not how Buddhism was practiced for most of the time in the last 2500 years. It was mostly an oral tradition and as such the knowledge that's passed down from teacher to student evolves over time in various ways. 

Many modern Buddhist tradition put much more emphasis on meditation in contrast to ritualized behavior. 

In Buddhism (and in Christanity for that matter) for thousands of years meditation was largely done in monasteries and not by lay-people. In many Buddhist communities "lay-people aren't supposed to meditate" is something you could call "ancient wisdom". 

In someone convinces you in a Western context that following some practice is ancient wisdom, they are likely doing a lot of picking and choosing in a way that does not make it clear how ancient the thing they are promoting actually happens to be. 

There seem to be clinical trials underway for regrowing teeth in Japan: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a60952102/tooth-regrowth-human-trials-japan/

I gave you three sources that are influential to my views. A Spiegel article, a conversation with someone who in the past was planning to run a brothel (and spoke with people who actually run brothels in Germany for that reason) and police sources.

I did not link to some activist NGO run by prudish leftists or religious people or making claims as a reason for me believing what I believe. 

In general, it's hard to know what's actually going on when it comes to crime. If you spoke in the 1950s about the Italian mafia, you had plenty of people calling you racist against Italians and say that there's no mafia.

My point is that the behavior is not well modeled as "hunting humans". They don't attack humans with the intent to kill and eat as prey.