4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3yr ago
To give an overview of what I believe is a reasonable bounded-rationality basis to dismiss this objection:
I am not equipped to evaluate the claims in Alexandros's post in detail without significant effort and time investment (despite being a working academic in a quantitative field).
I'm not particularly worried about COVID and the societal excesses of the response seem to have already died down, so I personally don't see much value in learning about a surprising therapy for it. It seems unlikely to me that even if something like the contents of this post became widely accepted as truth, the societal response next time something COVID-shaped happens would be much beter.
Superficially, it seems there is no particular reason why something like Ivermectin (an antiparasitic that apparently works by disrupting the metabolism of fairly complex multicellular parasites) would work against COVID (a virus). I have a strong prior on most medicines claimed to have a minor beneficial effect on popular therapeutic targets actually being completely ineffectual (as this has been my experience).
On the other hand, the "parasite load" story seems superficially plausible.
Due to the culture-war dimension of Ivermectin, whose efficacy the red tribe in the US has entangled its social status with (no point in recounting the way this happened here), there is an obvious motivation for members of that tribe to produce compelling-looking arguments for its efficacy. Since Alexandros posts around this community, he seems a priori likely to harbour Red sympathies.
Moreover, there is a "contrarian" tribe that is motivated by taking down the rationality-orthogonal "trust the science" wing of the blue tribe, and therefore would also derive utility from successfully Eulering in favour of Ivermectin. Many people seem to talk about the abrasiveness of Alexandros's tone. This increases the probability that he's Red or Contrarian and would therefore have the motive to come to his conclusion.
In short, a situation that seems fairly symmetrical to "read this long and extremely compelling essay by a Harvard academic who is also a Twitter superstar using Science and Logic to prove that Blank Slatism is true". If you had unlimited time and resources or a particularly high stake in finding out whether desirable qualities of humans are genetic, sure, by all means you ought to read it and analyse the argument. For most everyone else, it would be more rational to ignore the essay, leave your prior largely unshifted and spend the time it would take to read on something with higher expected utility, like planning tomorrow's healthy breakfast or getting on top of your todo list.
Things that could convince me to take the essay more seriously:
Establish that the author does not stand to benefit from Ivermectin working, e.g. has impeccable blue tribe credentials.
Establish that rehabilitating Ivermectin would benefit me personally a great deal.
Propose a plausible mechanism by which Ivermectin (specifically!) might work against COVID. Some general handwaving like "it modulates the way the immune system operates" won't work; lots of drugs do that, so I don't see why specifically the one that the Blues are raging against and the Reds are swearing will prove once and for all they should actually be in charge should be the one that happens to modulate it just right.
Relatedly, but harder, shift my prior regarding medicines that purport to do anything more complex than targeting one particular well-understood metabolic pathway not working.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
Monicen 3yr ago·Edited 3yr ago
Bounded rationality is a real field of study, describing optimal behaviour for agents who can't actually reason and obtain information infinitely for free.
Even Yudkowsky concedes that rationality is about winning. It seems pretty straightforward to see that someone who is still busy calculating probabilities to see if some skub paper checks out while the police remove him from the premises as the debt collector wants to foreclose his home is not winning. As a corollary, if the gut feeling strategy consistently gets better outcomes than the "reason and logic" one, it's more rational.
By your reasoning, shooting your enemy in the head rather than arguing against him is the most rational thing you can do.
"Rationality is about winning" is affected by the question of "rationality towards doing what?" Rationality towards beating your enemies is won by having enemies who are beaten, but rationality about making correct arguments is only won by having correct arguments.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
Jiro 3yr ago
Sometimes it is. Sometimes you have other enemies though, and signalling to them that you will shoot them might inspire them to gang up against you and shoot you first.
Most people reading this post will have some value functions that are not actually that different from each other, which are meant to optimise for general day-to-day flourishing of themselves and some limited set of other people they care about, and then perhaps to a lesser extent some aesthetic and moral preferences about the larger society they find themselves in. What I was aiming to demonstrate is that those people can quite rationally - towards their own value function - decide to dismiss this essay and not shift their opinion on Ivermectin, contra the "rationalists proven not so rational after all!" rhetoric that has been surrounding its propagation.
What I was aiming to demonstrate is that those people can quite rationally - towards their own value function - decide to dismiss this essay and not shift their opinion on Ivermectin
Only if their value function is not about making correct arguments and believing accurate things.
Of course, this then becomes a motte and bailey, where the motte is "it's rational because it wins according to a value function that doesn't value truth" and the bailey is "it's rational in the way that 'rational' is ordinarily used in this context".
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Notes -
To give an overview of what I believe is a reasonable bounded-rationality basis to dismiss this objection:
I am not equipped to evaluate the claims in Alexandros's post in detail without significant effort and time investment (despite being a working academic in a quantitative field).
I'm not particularly worried about COVID and the societal excesses of the response seem to have already died down, so I personally don't see much value in learning about a surprising therapy for it. It seems unlikely to me that even if something like the contents of this post became widely accepted as truth, the societal response next time something COVID-shaped happens would be much beter.
Superficially, it seems there is no particular reason why something like Ivermectin (an antiparasitic that apparently works by disrupting the metabolism of fairly complex multicellular parasites) would work against COVID (a virus). I have a strong prior on most medicines claimed to have a minor beneficial effect on popular therapeutic targets actually being completely ineffectual (as this has been my experience).
On the other hand, the "parasite load" story seems superficially plausible.
Due to the culture-war dimension of Ivermectin, whose efficacy the red tribe in the US has entangled its social status with (no point in recounting the way this happened here), there is an obvious motivation for members of that tribe to produce compelling-looking arguments for its efficacy. Since Alexandros posts around this community, he seems a priori likely to harbour Red sympathies.
Moreover, there is a "contrarian" tribe that is motivated by taking down the rationality-orthogonal "trust the science" wing of the blue tribe, and therefore would also derive utility from successfully Eulering in favour of Ivermectin. Many people seem to talk about the abrasiveness of Alexandros's tone. This increases the probability that he's Red or Contrarian and would therefore have the motive to come to his conclusion.
In short, a situation that seems fairly symmetrical to "read this long and extremely compelling essay by a Harvard academic who is also a Twitter superstar using Science and Logic to prove that Blank Slatism is true". If you had unlimited time and resources or a particularly high stake in finding out whether desirable qualities of humans are genetic, sure, by all means you ought to read it and analyse the argument. For most everyone else, it would be more rational to ignore the essay, leave your prior largely unshifted and spend the time it would take to read on something with higher expected utility, like planning tomorrow's healthy breakfast or getting on top of your todo list.
Things that could convince me to take the essay more seriously:
Establish that the author does not stand to benefit from Ivermectin working, e.g. has impeccable blue tribe credentials.
Establish that rehabilitating Ivermectin would benefit me personally a great deal.
Propose a plausible mechanism by which Ivermectin (specifically!) might work against COVID. Some general handwaving like "it modulates the way the immune system operates" won't work; lots of drugs do that, so I don't see why specifically the one that the Blues are raging against and the Reds are swearing will prove once and for all they should actually be in charge should be the one that happens to modulate it just right.
Relatedly, but harder, shift my prior regarding medicines that purport to do anything more complex than targeting one particular well-understood metabolic pathway not working.
Bounded rationality is a real field of study, describing optimal behaviour for agents who can't actually reason and obtain information infinitely for free.
Even Yudkowsky concedes that rationality is about winning. It seems pretty straightforward to see that someone who is still busy calculating probabilities to see if some skub paper checks out while the police remove him from the premises as the debt collector wants to foreclose his home is not winning. As a corollary, if the gut feeling strategy consistently gets better outcomes than the "reason and logic" one, it's more rational.
By your reasoning, shooting your enemy in the head rather than arguing against him is the most rational thing you can do.
"Rationality is about winning" is affected by the question of "rationality towards doing what?" Rationality towards beating your enemies is won by having enemies who are beaten, but rationality about making correct arguments is only won by having correct arguments.
Sometimes it is. Sometimes you have other enemies though, and signalling to them that you will shoot them might inspire them to gang up against you and shoot you first.
Most people reading this post will have some value functions that are not actually that different from each other, which are meant to optimise for general day-to-day flourishing of themselves and some limited set of other people they care about, and then perhaps to a lesser extent some aesthetic and moral preferences about the larger society they find themselves in. What I was aiming to demonstrate is that those people can quite rationally - towards their own value function - decide to dismiss this essay and not shift their opinion on Ivermectin, contra the "rationalists proven not so rational after all!" rhetoric that has been surrounding its propagation.
Only if their value function is not about making correct arguments and believing accurate things.
Of course, this then becomes a motte and bailey, where the motte is "it's rational because it wins according to a value function that doesn't value truth" and the bailey is "it's rational in the way that 'rational' is ordinarily used in this context".
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