Readit Newsnsainsbury commented on Among the A.I. doomsayers newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/preetamjinka
We're not going to make it to anywhere close to AGI before we see widespread and systematic societal and environmental collapse on almost all fronts due to climate change.
We're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction right now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction), we're in unparalleled territory with ocean warming: (https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/) and as a society we are utterly incapable of reducing CO2 emissions (https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/).
If you're scared of AGI, instead step away from your monitor, put down the techno-goggles and sci-fi books, and go educate yourself a bit about the profound ways we are changing the natural world for the worse _right now_
I can recommend a couple of books if you'd like to learn more:
Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency (https://www.amazon.com/Our-Final-Warning-Degrees-Emergency-e...)
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (https://www.amazon.com/Uninhabitable-Earth-Life-After-Warmin...)
Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant's Guide (https://www.amazon.com/Hothouse-Earth-Inhabitants-Bill-McGui...)
For anyone looking for the related talk from LeCun discussing the proposed architecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRzvpV9DZ8Y
As a person working in science (long past PhD), I disagree.
There are tons of problem in science: grant system, pressure to publish etc. Also everyone in science is still a person with standard people problems: ego, desire to be right, wanting recognition etc. Also some fields had more issues because of poor statistical methods etc.
But the self-correcting nature of science is still its biggest redeeming feature. And therefore unless I can figure out things by myself, I'll trust scientific consensus. I may not trust individual papers, as people make mistakes, may have an axe to grind, but I'll believe the consensus. For sure occasionally even scientific consensus will be wrong.
Science does eventually self-correct, but unfortunately it takes far too long to do so.
One area I've studied pretty extensively is the history of cancer treatment. In the long story of the history of cancer treatment, it is absolutely scandalous how often the scientific consensus was wrong and persisted for years in spite of the evidence. For example, the radical mastectomy for the treatment of breast cancer continued to be used for many years, leaving many women disfigured, in spite of wide evidence that it did not produce better outcomes vs more restrained breast tissue removal.
In the history of science, many of these kinds of bad ideas have persisted simply due to deference/seniority - the incentives are all stacked towards paying your dues and not challenging the status quo and absolutely not towards being right/following the actual scientific method. There is a reason the saying "Science advances one funeral at a time" exists - as Max Planck noted: "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Just throwing my 2c into the well, as someone who used to be highly "pro-science" but lost confidence in much of academia and the validity of scientific research in general after starting a PhD and seeing how the sausage is made.
The biggest problem science is facing is not an external threat from a rabble of ignorant science deniers, but the complete degradation of quality within the scientific institutions themselves.
Most research is flawed or useless, but published anyway because it's expedient for the authors to do so. Plenty of useful or interesting angles are not investigated at all because doing so would risk invalidating the expert status of the incumbents. Of the science that is communicated to the public (much of which is complete horseshit), the scientists themselves are often complicit in the misrepresentation of their own research as it means more of those sweet, sweet grants. The net result is the polished turd that is scientific research in the 21st century.
"Educated" people can say what they want about how important it is to believe in the science and have faith in our researchers and the institutions they work for.
The fact remains that if one were to assume that every single scientific discovery of the last 25 years was complete bullshit, they'd be right more often than they were wrong.
Yes, absolutely this.
I don't think many people outside of academia truly understand how much scientific research has degraded over the years.
There are an extremely small number of fields in which the overall quality is still quite high (mathematics, etc.) but overwhelmingly the social sciences, medical science, etc. are wastelands of p-hacked, low-N, biased, poorly designed studies that can't be replicated (not to mention the outright frauds and absolutely rampant plagiarism).
Every intelligent person should be deeply, deeply skeptical of papers published in particular fields over the last ~20 years.
nsainsbury commented on Covid-19 vaccines and treatments: we must have raw data, now bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o... · Posted by u/steelstraw
But we actually don't need the VAERS data to examine if the vaccines are better than the alternative. We do need it to provide accurate labels for side effects, but that is all.
We can simply look at infection, hospitalization and death in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. If we properly match the populations, we can determine if the vaccine saves lives, and it turns out that they do save a lot of lives.
That's true. And I agree that the vaccines have saved lives - mostly, of the old and the very sick/unhealthy.
However, what is less clear today is whether there has been a net positive or negative effect of the vaccine for young healthy people. You can only come to that conclusion if you actually had high quality data and studies on vaccine side-effects, effectiveness in population groups stratified by age, health, etc.
I suspect that the vaccines, mandates, lockdowns, etc. have been a net negative for the overall health of young (<50), and healthy people, and the body of scientific evidence will support this position in the future. It's just cloudy today because it's wrapped up in politics...but the science will eventually win out.
nsainsbury commented on Covid-19 vaccines and treatments: we must have raw data, now bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o... · Posted by u/steelstraw
At this point the original phase 3 trials are pretty much irrelevant, we have so much more data now from the actual use of the vaccines. They really play no role at all now. In terms of effectivness we're three major SARS-CoV2 variants further, and for looking at rare side effects we have billions of doses now compared to tens of thousands in those trials.
I'm all for putting pressure on everyone in Science to publish more raw data. This kind of data is likely more complicated because it's really hard if not impossible to anonymize the actual patient-level data. It still should be as accessible as possible to other scientists.
Actually, I would argue we don't have good data from the use of the vaccines. Part of the reason is because all the mechanisms used for reporting things like side-effects, effectiveness, etc. have a litany of confounding variables which haven't been controlled for which could be far better corrected for/isolated with good studies.
For example, when it comes to vaccine side-effects, I don't think there exists a true account for how common the side-effects really are. The most common way to report side-effects (VAERS, and similar national databases) are dismissed due to the self-reporting nature, local GPs frequently dismiss side-effects and tell people to just go home and take a Panadol with zero reporting going on (I had this happen to me - started experiencing severe chest pain 2 days post-Pfizer. Subsequently saw a cardiologist after months of pain and his comment to me was "I'm seeing young people like you daily and your cases are going widely underreported"), etc.
Likewise, when it comes to vaccine effectiveness, there are a million and one confounding variables from % of the population that already had natural immunity, covid variants, health, age, seasonality, societal lockdowns, isolation, etc.
Also, it's important I think for us to raise the bar to the highest possible standard when you're talking about a medical intervention that was forced under significant duress (loss of job, social stigma, public/medical shaming) on a substantial percentage of the world's population. We should not be content as a society to come within inches of worldwide medical authoritarianism without asking some seriously hard fucking questions and imposing the absolute strictest and highest possible scientific standards to justify why.
We're so in search of novelty, we ignore the bus steadily making its way straight towards us as we stand in the middle of the road, doing absolutely nothing - and with no hint that anything or anyone will come to save us - and instead we keep reading tea leaves and imagining more fascinating and wonderful dangers that have a near zero chance of manifesting before the bus hits us.
To some extent, the bus ending is just too boring it seems for anyone to really become engaged by it - narratively speaking.