Astral Codex Ten Podcast Jeremiah

One of the most common arguments against AI safety is:
Here’s an example of a time someone was worried about something, but it didn’t happen. Therefore, AI, which you are worried about, also won’t happen.
I always give the obvious answer: “Okay, but there are other examples of times someone was worried about something, and it did happen, right? How do we know AI isn’t more like those?” The people I’m arguing with always seem so surprised by this response, as if I’m committing some sort of betrayal by destroying their beautiful argument.
The first hundred times this happened, I thought I must be misunderstanding something. Surely “I can think of one thing that didn’t happen, therefore nothing happens” is such a dramatic logical fallacy that no human is dumb enough to fall for it. But people keep bringing it up, again and again. Very smart people, people who I otherwise respect, make this argument and genuinely expect it to convince people!
Usually the thing that didn’t happen is overpopulation, global cooling, etc. But most recently it was some kind of coffeepocalypse:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/desperately-trying-to-fathom-the 

Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias more or less believes medicine doesn’t work [EDIT: see his response here, where he says this is an inaccurate summary of his position. Further chain of responses here and here]
This is a strong claim. It would be easy to round Hanson’s position off to something weaker, like “extra health care isn’t valuable on the margin”. This is how most people interpret the studies he cites. Still, I think his current, actual position is that medicine doesn’t work. For example, he writes:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-hanson-on-medical-effectiveness 

[previously in series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
When that April with his sunlight fierce
The rainy winter of the coast doth pierce
And filleth every spirit with such hale
As horniness engenders in the male
Then folk go out in crop tops and in shorts
Their bodies firm from exercise and sports
And men gaze at the tall girls and the shawties
And San Franciscans long to go to parties.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ye-olde-bay-area-house-party 

Lumina, the genetically modified anti-tooth-decay bacterium that I wrote about in December, is back in the news after lowering its price from $20,000 to $250 and getting endorsements from Yishan Wong, Cremieux, and Richard Hanania (as well as anti-endorsements from Saloni and Stuart Ritchie). A few points that have come up:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/updates-on-lumina-probiotic

Original post here. Table of contents below. I want to especially highlight three things.
First, Saar wrote a response to my post (and to zoonosis arguments in general). I’ve put a summary and some my responses at 1.11, but you can read the full post on the Rootclaim blog.
Second, I kind of made fun of Peter for giving some very extreme odds, and I mentioned they were sort of trolling, but he’s convinced me they were 100% trolling. Many people held these poorly-done calculations against Peter, so I want to make it clear that’s my fault for mis-presenting it. See 3.1 for more details.
Third, in my original post, I failed to mention that Peter also has a blog, including a post summing up his COVID origins argument.
Thanks to some people who want to remain anonymous for helping me with this post. Any remaining errors are my own.
1: Comments Arguing Against Zoonosis
— 1.1: Is COVID different from other zoonoses?
— 1.2: Were the raccoon-dogs wild-caught?
— 1.3: 92 early cases
— 1.4: COVID in Brazilian wastewater
— 1.5 Biorealism’s 16 arguments
— 1.6: DrJayChou’s 7 arguments
— 1.7: How much should coverup worry us?
— 1.8: Have Worobey and Pekar been debunked?
— 1.9: Was there ascertainment bias in early cases
— 1.10: Connor Reed / Gwern on cats
— 1.11: Rootclaim’s response to my post
2: Comments Arguing Against Lab Leak
— 2.1: Is the pandemic starting near WIV reverse correlation?
3: Other Points That Came Up
— 3.1: Apology to Peter re: extreme odds
— 3.2: Tobias Schneider on Rootclaim’s Syria Analysis
— 3.3: Closing thoughts on Rootclaim
4: Summary And Updates
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7 

[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-april-2024