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If you wanted to learn that there was a new deadly epidemic in China, you’d have to expose yourself to a lot of content most people would rather not see.
I don't think this claim as written is true. I learned of COVID-19 for the first time from BBC News on New Years' Eve 2019 and followed the course of the pandemic obsessively in January/February on BBC News and some academic website whose name I've forgotten (I think it was affiliated with the University of Washington?) without ever going on 4chan or other similar forums.
Maybe instead narrating posts automatically when published, the poster could be shown a message like “Do you want to narrate this post right now? Once narrated, the audio cannot be changed.” And if they say no then there’s a button they can press to narrate it later (e.g. after editing). And maybe you could charge $1 if people want to change the audio after accepting their one free narration?
quinoa or "raw water" or burnt food or fad diets
What's wrong with quinoa?
Hmmm, I think there's still some linguistic confusion remaining. While we certainly need to invent new mathematics to describe quantum field theory, are you making the stronger claim that there's something "non-native" about the way that wavefunctions in non-relativistic quantum mechanics are described using functional analysis? Especially since a lot of modern functional analysis theory was motivated by quantum mechanics, I don't see how a new branch of math could describe wavefunctions more natively.
I was assigned this reading for a class once but only skimmed it - now I wish I'd read it more closely!
Okay, so by "wavefunction as a classical mathematical object" you mean a vector in Hilbert space? In that case, what do you mean by the adjective "classical"?
Why do you speak of deterministic, stochastic, and quantum as three options for a fundamental ontology? In the absence of a measurement/collapse postulate, quantum mechanics is a deterministic theory, and with a collapse postulate, it's a stochastic theory in the sense that the state of the system evolves deterministically except for instantaneous stochastic jumps when "measurements" occur.
Also, what do you mean by "the wavefunction as a classical mathematical object"?
Where could I find the proof that “as quantum amplitude of a piece of the wavefunction goes to zero, the probability that I will ‘find myself’ in that piece also goes to zero” is equivalent to the Born rule?
This might be the closest thing to such a list: https://www.goodtheorist.science/
The entirety of Japanese society, government, politics, economy, etc, changed dramatically beginning in the late 1940’s, in a rather sudden way largely due to the influence of a foreign power. Thus I think that the fact that formal legal equality for women in Japan began in the late 40’s, and Japan’s fertility rate decline also began in the late 40’s, provides extremely little information on the relationship between gender equality and fertility in developed countries. Edit: Thomas Kwa already said basically the same thing, I just didn’t see his comment when I wrote mine.
Is it still true that “more gender egalitarian countries have lower fertility rates” if you only include industrialized / wealthy countries? Thinking off the top of my head, some of the least gender egalitarian OECD countries, South Korea and Japan, also have some of the lowest fertility rates.
Especially given the popularity of hpmor, I’m confused to learn that it’s common for rationalists to not want to fight bullying.
I'm glad you liked the article! As for your one disagreement with the quoted passage, I think the all in the phrase "all university mathematicians" is key to her point. Mathematicians at prestigious private universities and well-known state flagship universities are indeed able to teach university-level mathematics due to the adequate supply of mathematically-prepared students that remains despite bad k-12 math education. But a large percentage of university mathematicians are at less prestigious institutions where very few students major in math and most of the demand for math courses comes from students who didn't have a good math experience in k-12 schooling (and weren't taught math at home by mathematically savvy parents) but need to satisfy a gen ed requirement.
A related article from 2005 arguing that it's important to teach elementary school teachers more mathematics in order for their teaching to improve: https://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf.
What thought process do you think goes into your guess that very few non-human animals can leave a meaningful and fulfilling life? My guess is that many mammals and birds can live a meaningful and fulfilling life, though the phrase “meaningful and fulfilling” strikes me as hard to specify. I’m mostly thinking that having emotionally significant social bonds with other individuals is sufficient for a life to be meaningful and fulfilling, and that many mammals and birds can form emotionally significant social bonds.
Reflecting on what I found while Googling, I think the phrase “XKCD protest” refers not to a protest portrayed in an XKCD comic but rather to an XKCD comic that was used in a protest: https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/6uu5wj/xkcd_1357_in_the_boston_protest_xpost_rpics/
This is a pretty standard joke/stereotype, the XKCD protest where the signs are giant and full of tiny text specifying exactly what we mean.
Can somebody link to this comic? My attempts to Google different combinations of "XKCD", "protests", and "giant sign" were unsuccessful.
What were these life-changing insights?
I agree that "claims of harm that route through sharing of true information will nearly-always be very small compared to the harms that route through people being less informed", I just don't see it as a straightforward reading of the paragraph I was commenting on. But arguing over the exegesis of a blog post is probably a waste of time if we agree at the object level.
The "Ignoring known falsehoods until they're a PR problem" section seems a bit out of place. The other examples you point out seem to be of vegans not wanting to discuss possible nutritional issues with veganism because they don't want to make statements that are semantically associated with normative claims endorsing a world with nonzero animal agriculture.
But with ACE, it seems like the answer to the question of whether pamphleting is an effective way to get people to reduce their animal product consumption is orthogonal to whether or not people should go vegan or become vegan activists, right? After all, if you want there to be more vegans, and that's what's really emotionally motivating you, you should be very open to evidence indicating pamphleting is ineffective so that activists can spend their time doing something better. I feel like if ACE was being epistemically unreasonable as to which forms of vegan activism are most effective, that would be an example of general "I don't want to admit that I'm wrong about something" behavior rather than "I don't want to reveal true information that will harm the growth of a movement I'm attached to" behavior.
I am less convinced of the link between excess meat and health issues than I was before I read it, because surely if the claim was easy to prove the paper would have better supporting evidence, or the EA Forum commenter would have picked a better source.
This may be a valid update, but I think there's also a Hanlon's razor-esque argument to be made that even if a claim is easy to prove, we would expect to observe many terrible arguments made in its favor due to most humans being generally stupid and lazy.
But I can’t trust his math because he’s cut himself off from half the information necessary to do the calculations. How can he estimate the number of vegans harmed or lost due to nutritional issues if he doesn’t let people talk about them in public?
This paragraph seems like a fully general counterargument against ever refraining from an information-gathering action because the expected value of the information provided by the action is less than the expected harm coming from the action. Yet evidently there are examples in e.g. medicine where one ought to do so.
One approach that sometimes works for me is to identify the forms of wasting time that I use most often to avoid working, and then promise my girlfriend I won’t engage in them for a set period of time. I find that this works a lot better than just trying to make an individual commitment because if I engage in one of the forms of wasting time, I’ll have broken a promise to my girlfriend, and I intrinsically really highly value being honest with the people I love.
This is really interesting. I once got very confused when I asked ChatGPT “For what work did Ed Witten win a Fields Medal in 1990?” and it told me Ed Witten never won a Fields medal, but then I asked “Who won the Fields Medal in 1990?” and the answer included Ed Witten. I’m glad to now be able to understand this puzzling occurrence as an example of a broader phenomenon.
If we accidentally happen to create a murderous personal AI, then we can't let it kill anyone, but it would also be immoral to shut it down, or alter its values.
Why do you believe it would be immoral to alter the values of a misaligned sentient AI?
Typo: "If you arrived here out of interested in AI" instead of "If you arrived here out of interest in AI".
Hell, Germany just shut down their remaining nuclear power plants during the middle of an energy crisis because of a bunch of misguided idiots from the green party think nuclear power is unsafe. They managed to convince government officials to shut down operational nuclear plants and replace the with coal-fired power plants using coal [SUPPLIED BY RUSSIA.](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/05/business/germany-russia-oil-gas-coal.html)
If we consider that the thing in this example analogous to AI might not be "nuclear power" but rather "electricity generation", then this could demonstrate stupid regulations impairing one form of a technology but thereby giving a relative advantage to a form of the technology which is more dangerous but in a way which is less visible to the stupid regulations.