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Ability to go sleep... Sleep deprivation is one of the greatest effect sizes for IQ
Interesting!
Being alive is so much fun. Sleep is death, I don't want to sleep!
I not only feel censored, I am censored in the sense that my ability to speak is being taken away. The causality seems to be people downvoting --> negative karma --> algo prevents posting, but that's still censorship
The point of probabilities is to quantify uncertainty, not to wait until you are omnipotent and have all the data needed to reach certainty
it's the largest wet market in central China
Got a source for that?
My impression of Huanan Seafood Market is that it contained only a very small number of animals that are even potential candidates for the virus, and is mostly fish (seafood).
Wikipedia contradicts itself on this, claiming circa 100 animals in one section and then circa 10,000 in a different section. Do you know what is going on here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanan_Seafood_Wholesale_Market#Facility_and_operations
I don't think you understand probability theory
I'm open to sponsorship to do further research at $200/hr. DM me if you're interested.
Credibly dismiss? What?
Given that they were already caught in two separate coverups, it is not only not implausible it is highly likely that some kind of cover-up of the early cases was attempted. The only question is whether they succeeded to the extent of making it look like the wet market was the origin.
hmmm interesting
The whole point of probability theory is to make decisions when you do not have "perfect data sources"
Why even talk about probabilistic reasoning if you won't use it until the data is "perfect" and you are omniscient?
Related:
It is not a misprint.
This kind of strategy is rational once you're sure that The Singularity is going to happen and it's just a matter of waiting out Moore's Law, there are benefits to being first.
Yes. I have noticed that I prefer hyphens, and now that I think about why it's because they make writing less ambiguous.
pandemics are arguably more likely to originate in large cities because population density facilitates spread, large wildlife markets are more likely, and they serve as major travel hubs
China was 63% Urban in 2020.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/270162/urbanization-in-china/
Say it's 2x more likely in Urban areas. It doesn't really make that much difference. Plus, there is some probability of it going to Vietnam or other SE Asian countries (Vietnam is closer to Yunnan than Wuhan is).
thx
It's not specifically DEFUSE, it's DEFUSE and all possible related dangerous GoF work which became possible post 2017
It doesn't specifically have to be DEFUSE, it just has to be some work which started after the following key events:
circa 2011: technology becomes available for dangerous GoF and people start discussing it
circa 2018: ban on GoF is lifted
WIV scientists' behavior after leak (talking about adding fcs to coronavirus in december, going to dinner, publishing ratg13)
wait, they talked about adding a FCS? Where?
proline at fcs, otherwise suboptimal fcs, out of frame insertion,
I have never heard of this, where can I find out more?
But we are updating on the timing.
Under the null hypothesis we assign equal probability to each year between 1980 and 2060, and they add up to 1. So there is an assumption there that a pandemic will definitely occur starting in china.
We should make the same assumption under the alternate hypothesis. The only difference is under AH there's a lab leak. So we just adjust the way the probability is allocated by year. It still has to add up to 100%.
So, maybe we'll have a uniform background of 0.1% per year between 1980 and 2060, and then after the 2011 events where people started talking about GoF it increases a bit as GoF is at least possible, then it increases again in 2017 when GoF is funded and greenlit, and after that each year it decreases a little bit, think of it as a hazard rate, once it has happened once people will start being cautious again.
It has to be conditional on a massive global pandemic starting in that country at all, to make a fair comparison with the 2/80 calculation under the null hypothesis.
But say we break it down into two parts. (1) probability that the GoF research does have the potential to cause a pandemic and (2) distribution in time of the pandemic after research starts.
I'm avoiding that as I don't understand the data provenance/cover-up potential.
The point of this post is to process just the "clean" data - stuff that interested parties such as WIV, Ecohealth and WHO could not have changed or affected.
Of course others should try to look into that and work out what's going on.
What pieces of circumstantial evidence are unlikely under the Lab Leak hypothesis?
I don't think evidence should generally be two-sided. E.g. imagine a game that's an amateur versus Magnus Carlsen, but you don't know who is white and who is black. If you look at the outcomes of moves as individual bits, it will be very one-sided.
please elaborate ....
e.g. this bet
also contributes to the idea that the prior cannot be that small since Rees bet on it in 2017.
Under the alternate hypothesis, location, warnings, timing and specific features are all much more likely. It's probably something like 0.6^4 ~= 0.12
Priors for a lab leak vs a natural spillover are a bit harder, but we have examples of lab leak such as foot and mouth disease in the UK, other leaks of covid, etc. I think a reasonable prior for a lab leak is between 1% and 30% but priors are of course not something we can expect everyone to agree on.
some people truly are beyond help lol
I think the most likely source for a coordination singularity is crypto, not prediction markets.
PMs will not get you out of bad NEs.
. I do not stack with the people doing more crypto-focused stuff
why not?
That just shows different intel orgs have different ideas.
We know from declassified docs that the spate of UFO sightings in the 1940s and 1950s were caused by various US spy balloon projects, but different parts of the US military and intel are very heavily siloed from each other so even most of the military thought the UFOs were real.
Regarding cases at the Wuhan Central Hospital and HPHICWM, patients with a history of exposure at Huanan Market could not have been “cherry picked” before anyone had identified the market as an epidemiologic risk factor. Hence, there was a genuine preponderance of early COVID-19 cases associated with Huanan Market.
I see. So the claim is that these early cases were reported via channels that could not have been messed with, and they could not have been cherry picked because it was not known what the disease was.
But I suppose it is still possible that maybe these records were actually messed with, or that someone from WIV or SKVL or whatever deliberately infected the market with covid-19 as they knew it would make for a fairly bulletproof cover of an actual leak that they already knew about. Or something else weird like that - maybe intel did it on purpose for some convoluted set of reasons, knowing that it would create an ambiguous situation with some people pointing at a lab leak and some people pointing at the market.
Weird things happen in the murky world of human conflicts.
It is weird, but there are two different groups (China, Daszak/Ecohealth) with different incentives. In fact there are more than two different groups - Wuhan local authorities and Chinese central party officials had different incetives.
The Chinese initially wanted to cover it up, but they couldn't keep that up forever. Daszak and Echohealth (and likely parts of the US intelligence agencies and military) desperately wanted this to not be a lab leak, as shown by FOIA'd emails from early 2020.
So, who faked what? Who molested the data before I get to see it?
I've always wanted to see some hard data on this. All the wet markets in China and Vietnam, numbers of animals per month, etc. That kind of model would be extremely useful in pinning down just how unlucky an innocent WIV would be.
That does sound interesting. I think I have a solution.
It appears to me that all evidence for the claim that the virus originated in the wet market pass through Chinese government sources
This is my concern.
Data from Wuhan in early 2020 is "dirty". It had to pass through Chinese government hands, and then maybe also got filtered by the 2021 WHO investigation which was headed by... well you know who ;-)
The full arguments for a proposition can be arbitrarily long. You have to select a finite subset to even engage with.
yes.
I think it is implausible that an unrelated coronavirus with a FCS would magically make itself very genetically similar to existing sarbecoronaviruses. Of course it could make itself phenotypically similar (like whales are to sharks) but the genome would look very different.
we should expect the frontpage to be curated to be more conforming to mainstream viewpoints
I believe that that is the case and may be appropriate for LW
FYI: I think it's entirely reasonable to leave this post as a personal blogpost if the LW mod team feel that it is too "spicy" to associate with the LW brand.
If in a few years it turns out that the thesis here is proven correct one can discuss how to handle controversial but plausibly true posts.
because of your attachment to specific model of causality known to ten people in entire world, you risk to notice this too late.
you're thinking about this the wrong way. AGI governance will not operate like human governance.
I think the risk with AI safety is whilst it is not an explicitly pro-tyranny ideology, there is an increasing need for governance and control, and so by blocking off governance by Friendly AGI we will not get less AI risk but more tyranny from human government structures (which are inherently corrupt and tyrannical because humans are untrustworthy and traditional human government structures are riddled with brokenness)
Humans already do this, except we have made it politically incorrect to talk about the ways in which human-generated Goodhearting make the world worse (race, gender, politics etc)
I think the first step will be using AGIs to come up with better plans.
The current paradigm of AI research makes it hard to make really pure tool AIs.
We have software tools, like Wolfram Alpha, and we have LLM-derived systems.
This is probably the set of tools we will either win or die with
How many lab similar to Wuhan in crowded cities
None. Wuhan is the only BSL4 lab in China, and it is the only place that did bat coronavirus gain of function research. And Shi Zhengli's group at WIV is the premier group in China that studies bat coronaviruses.
Daszak's comments say that much of the work could be done at WIV which could include the FCS. The comment is genuine AFAIK but you'll have to chase it up yourself.
The work on BsmBI is somewhat compelling because the people who suspected it published before DEFUSE was unearthed, and then DEFUSE was found to contain an order for BsmBI. So, they sort of predicted this. And there are reasons to make the virus out of relatively uniformly long segments - it's convenient, the tools and techniques have maximum lengths they can handle, and you want to minimize the total amount of work. So you use roughly equal length segments. However this is a fairly complicated series of claims and I don't see it as being the big win for lab-leak - the big win is DEFUSE itself.
But zoom out a bit: we can just notice that all of this stuff only collects around Wuhan, WIV and associated facilities like State Key Laboratory of Virology at Wuhan University.
There's no equivalent of this in all the other cities in China and I am pretty sure that if you look through the top 20 cities by population you won't find something like DEFUSE. I tried this a bit with chatGPT, Google Scholar, Google Search etc. There simply are not 50 other Daszaks out there doing GoF bat coronavirus research in every other city in China. Wuhan is THE PLACE where this happens.
I'm curious what makes you think COVID-19 was created in a lab and not a natural virus leaked while they were studying it.
Sorry, I misread this.
I don't have a strong opinion. I think it's plausible that it was a lab leak of a natural virus, though I will note that the more technical people are more skeptical of this, claiming that covid-19 was unusually good at spreading through humans even from the start, which is unlikely for a fully natural spillover.
If I knew more about the details of virology, I would have a stronger opinion.
Conditional on COVID-19 having escaped from a lab, why do you think it was created there rather than being a natural virus they were studying in that lab?
I don't have a strong opinion on that question.
Apparently that is the classical way to do things, though naming stuff after people is no longer done in modern biosciences.