Scientists terrified to discover that language, the thing they trained into an highly flexible matrix of nearly arbitrary numbers, ends up can exist in multiple forms, including forms unintended by the matrix!
What happens next, the kids lie to their parents so they can go out partying after dark? The fall of humanity!
Also seems relevant
Like in the deer, the large-scale target morphology can be revised – the pattern memory re-written – by transient physiological experience. The genetics sets the hardware with a default pattern outcome, but like any good cognitive system, it has a re-writable memory that learns from experience.
I wonder if Scott is the person who stood up during Michael Levin's talk on (non genetic) bio-electric circuits storing morphological memory across time and said, “those animals can’t exist!”
Just like neuroscientists try to read out and decode the memories inside a living brain, we can now read and write (a little bit…) the anatomical goals and memories of the collective intelligence of morphogenesis. The first time I presented this at a conference – genetically wild-type worms with a drastically different, rewritten, permanent, target morphology – someone stood up and said that this was impossible and “those animals can’t exist”. Here’s a video taken by Junji Morokuma, of them hanging out.
you forgot the last stage of the evolution,
you'll later find out that people were talking about you, your actions, your words, and that being ghosted was in fact the consequence of your actions, and then you'll have one last opportunity to turn it all around
or
Always my favorite part of your day.
Why protest when you could spend far less energy and just "not be wrong" and "have no stake" by over-fitting your statistical model to the past?
"priors updated" was the same desired outcome all along.
If I could sum up everything that's wrong with EA, it'd be,
"We can use statistics to do better than emotions!" in reality means "We are dysregulated and we aren't going to do anything about it!!!!"
So far, there has been zero or one[1] lab leak that led to a world-wide pandemic. Before COVID, I doubt anyone was even thinking about the probabilities of a lab leak leading to a worldwide pandemic.
So, actually, many people were thinking about lab leaks, and the potential of a worldwide pandemic, despite Scott's suggestion that stupid people weren't. For years now, bioengineering has been concerned with accidental lab leaks because the understanding that risk existed was widespread.
But the reality is that guessing at probabilities of this sort of thing still doesn't change anything. It's up to labs to pursue safety protocols, which happens at the economic edge of of the opportunity vs the material and mental cost of being diligent. Reality is that lab leaks may not change probabilities, but yes the events of them occurring does cause trauma which acts, not as some bayesian correction, but an emotional correction so that people's motivations for atleast paying more attention increases for a short while.
Other than that, the greatest rationalist on earth can't do anything with their statistics about label leaks.
This is the best paradox. Not only is Scott wrong to suggest people shouldn't be concerned about major events (the traumatic update to individual's memory IS valuable), but he's wrong to suggest that anything he or anyone does after updating their probabilities could possibly help them prepare meaningfully.
He's the most hilarious kind of wrong.
Ah, if only the world wasn't so full of "stupid people" updating their bayesians based off things they see on the news, because you should already be worried of and calculating your distributions for... inhales deeply terrorist nuclear attacks, mass shootings, lab leaks, famine, natural disasters, murder, sexual harassment, conmen, decay of society, copyright, taxes, spitting into the wind, your genealogy results, comets hitting the earth, UFOs, politics of any and every kind, and tripping on your shoe laces.
What... insight did any of this provide? Seriously. Analytical statistics is a mathematically consistent means of being technically not wrong, while using a lot of words, in order to disagree on feelings, and yet saying nothing.
Risk management is not a statistical question in fact. It's an economics question of your opportunities. It's why prepping is better seen as a hobby, a coping mechanism and not as viable means of surviving apocalypse. It's why even when a EA uses their super powers of bayesian rationality the answer in the magic eight ball is always just "try to make money, stupid".
One day, when Zack is a little older, I hope he learns it's okay to sometimes talk -to someone- instead of airing one's identity confusion like an arxiv prepublish paper.
Like, it's okay to be confused in a weird world, or even have controversial opinions. Make some friends you can actually trust, aren't demanding bayesian defenses of feelings, and chat this shit out buddy.
Feel free to ask Michael in the comments of his blog, he frequently replies, helpfully, with references. I mean all science is tentative, so skepticism is healthy.