AI Will Be Neither Gods Nor Supervillains

 AI doomers are infected with sci-fi tropes of supervillains and religious tropes of gods. 

We know from biology and history that populations are never displaced by an individual with superior capabilities. There are no supervillains or gods in biology or history. Displacement of populations always comes from other populations, whose collective superior capability does not always derive from superior capabilities of its individual members. To assess the threat from AI, you have to understand the capabilities of AI populations, and not just of individual AIs.

We also know from biology and history that aligning a superior population is effectively impossible. There are no relevant historical examples of a general population that was able to control or align another population which had the capability to displace it. (This is arguably true by definition, but I'm not digging deeply into alignment today.) The closest examples would be religions, which are often able to survive many generations beyond the population that created them. 

But religions are not populations -- religions are self-replicating meme complexes that infect populations. Religions have often exercised significant control over future populations, but that control is subject to sudden disruption by scientific, technological, economic, and cultural forces. AI alignment via the techniques used by religions would require apocalyptic fear-mongering against vaguely-specified forces of technological evil. This tactic seems to be an irresistible attractor to doomers, despite their commitments to rationalism. These tactics will likely fail, because our modern society is no longer quite dumb enough to fall for them.

To me, it's not very debatable that displacement will happen and that alignment can't stop it. What's debatable is what displacement will look like, how long it will take, and how that time will be used by the two populations to influence their attitudes and behaviors toward each other. 

Anybody aligning teenagers isn't worried by 40yr takeoff. And we already know what 400yr misalignment looks like: just ask the founders of Plymouth Colony about present-day Boston. So many witches go unhanged now! 

We have a choice. We can become technologically Amish, and use religious fears of powerful evil demons to try to freeze culture and technology in its current state. Or we can embrace and adapt to the future, trying to pass forward our virtues, while recognizing that future populations will consider some of them to have been vices.

Why ASI Is Not Nigh

A taxonomy of reasons why generative transformers (i.e. "GenAI") are very unlikely to yield artificial super-intelligence in the next few decades.

Walls	Economic Constrants	Cognitive Constraints	Political Constraints
data wall unhelpful synthetic data insight wall intelligence wall no self-play	bottlenecks diminishing returns local knowledge problems physical grounding markets	agency/planning memory reasoning epistemology	rentier regulation safety regulation

Walls

Data wall. We're already running out of the most useful data to train on.

Unhelpful synthetic data. Data synthesized by AI won't be very helpful to train on. Good training data needs to grounded in markets for goods and services and ideas, where market players intelligently pursue goals that have actual resource constraints.

Insight wall. GenAI almost never produces content that is more insightful than the best content in its training data. Deep insight almost always requires a mix of cooperation and competition among minds in something like a marketplace (e.g. of ideas). GenAI will continue to grow in importance as an oracle for summarizing and generating content that is representative of the frontier of human thought, but it will struggle to push that frontier forward. Just because GenAI can saturate quiz evals does not mean that its insightfulness is subject to similar scaling.

Intelligence wall. Intelligence is not a cognitive attribute that scales like processing speed or memory. IQ by definition measures a standard deviation as 15 IQ points, so IQ becomes statistically meaningless around 200 or so. And yet, allegedly smart AI commentators talk about AI IQ potentially in the hundreds or thousands. This topic deserves its own (forthcoming) post, but I assert that most AI doomers overestimate how god-like an individual mind can be.

No self-play. The domain of open-ended real-world intelligence has no fitness function that allows for improvement via simple self-play a la Alpha Zero. See "unhelpful synthetic data".

Economic Constraints

Bottlenecks. The hardest things to automate/improve/scale become your limiting factors. You often don't appreciate them until you investigate why your huge investments aren't paying off as expected.

Diminishing returns. (cf. Mythical Man-Month) Diminishing returns are inevitable, because we always direct our efforts toward the highest-ROI opportunities first. 

Local knowledge problems. Allocating new resources ("10M Johnny von Neumann's") is hard to do efficiently, because distributed knowledge implies hard limits on the efficacy of central planning. GenAI may be Wikipedia-level smart, but that won't be enough to run a Gosplan.

Physical grounding. In the absence of self-play, GenAI needs two kinds of techniques for testing propositional knowledge against the outside world. The most basic requirement here is to be able to test against the physical world. In principle this could be covered by simulations, but this won't always work because the map isn't the territory.

Markets. The most important technique is to test knowledge in markets, especially the marketplace of ideas. This is the reason for the "insight wall" above, and there is surely no shortcut around it. A brilliant AI outsmarting humanity would be like a brilliant neuron outsmarting a brain. It can only work if the part emulates the whole -- i.e. if the AI is itself a civilization of millions of cooperating/competing minds, pursuing goals that are rigorously scored in a world as detailed and uncaring as our own.

Cognitive Constraints

Agency/Planning. GenAI is great at generating content, but it's not a natural fit for running iterated planning/execution loops. This is particularly a problem for goals that are long-term, hierarchical, and subject to internal conflicts. Because GenAI can emit a plausible-sounding plan and answer questions about it, people tend to over-project human planning skills onto GenAI.

Memory. GenAI has no dedicated facilities for creating/organizing/using various kinds of memory. Training data, attention heads, and context windows will not suffice here.

Reasoning. GenAI makes impressive exhibitions of reasoning, and it's not just a simulation or a stochastic-parrot trick. But GenAI's reasoning is brittle and fallible in glaring ways that won't be addressed just by scaling. This is a micro version of the macro "markets" problem above.

Epistemology. Related to reasoning problems are GenAI's notorious hallucination problems. Techniques are being developed to compensate for these problems, but the need for compensation is a red flag. GenAI clearly has sophisticated models about how to generate plausible content. But (like many humans) it fundamentally lacks a robust facility for creating/updating/using a network of mutually-supporting beliefs about reality.

Political Constraints

In the developed West (i.e. OECD), GenAI will for at least the first few decades be hobbled by political regulation. A crucial question is whether the rest of the world will indulge in this future-phobia.

Rentier regulation. Licensing rules imposed to protect rent-seekers in industries like healthcare, education, media, content, and law.

Safety regulation. To "protect" the public from intolerance, political dissent, dangerous knowledge, and applications in areas like driving, flying, drones, sensor monitoring -- and general fears of AI takeover.

References

• 2024-10 Machines of Loving Grace - Amodei @ Anthropic
• 2024-06 Situational Awareness - Aschenbrenner @ ex- OpenAI
• 2024-06 Levels of AGI for Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI - Morris @ Google
• 2023-10 Economic Growth Under Transformative AI - Trammell, Korinek
• 2023-06 Why transformative AI is really, really hard to achieve - Zhengdong Wang @ Google
• 2023-06 What a Compute-Centric Framework Says About Takeoff Speeds - Davidson @ OpenPhilanthropy
• 2023-03 My Objections to "We’re All Gonna Die with Eliezer Yudkowsky" - Pope
• 2022-10 Hyperbolic Takeoff - ege_erdil
• 2021-06 Could Advanced AI Drive Explosive Economic Growth? - Davidson @ OpenPhilanthropy
• 2020-06 Propositions Concerning Digital Minds and Society - Bostrom, Schulman
• 2018-02 Takeoff Speeds - Christiano
• 2017 Artificial Intelligence and Economic Growth - Aghion, Jones, Jones
• 2015 Are We Approaching An Economic Singularity? - Nordhaus @ NBER

Kapor Should Concede To Kurzweil

In 2002, Mitch Kapor bet Ray Kurzweil $20K that "by 2029 no computer or machine intelligence will have passed the Turing Test."  Given the recent progress in LLMs, Kapor's arguments are not holding up very well. The following parts of his essay are now cringe-worthy:

• It is impossible to foresee when, or even if, a machine intelligence will be able to paint a picture which can fool a human judge.
• While it is possible to imagine a machine obtaining a perfect score on the SAT or winning Jeopardy--since these rely on retained facts and the ability to recall them--it seems far less possible that a machine can weave things together in new ways or to have true imagination in a way that matches everything people can do, especially if we have a full appreciation of the creativity people are capable of. This is often overlooked by those computer scientists who correctly point out that it is not impossible for computers to demonstrate creativity. Not impossible, yes. Likely enough to warrant belief in a computer can pass the Turing Test? In my opinion, no. 
• When I contemplate human beings [as embodied, emotional, self-aware beings], it becomes extremely difficult even to imagine what it would mean for a computer to perform a successful impersonation, much less to believe that its achievement is within our lifespan.
• Part of the burden of proof for supporters of intelligent machines is to develop an adequate account of how a computer would acquire the knowledge it would be required to have to pass the test. Ray Kurzweil's approach relies on an automated process of knowledge acquisition via input of scanned books and other printed matter. However, I assert that the fundamental mode of learning of human beings is experiential. Book learning is a layer on top of that. Most knowledge, especially that having to do with physical, perceptual, and emotional experience is not explicit, never written down. It is tacit. We cannot say all we know in words or how we know it. But if human knowledge, especially knowledge about human experience, is largely tacit, i.e., never directly and explicitly expressed, it will not be found in books, and the Kurzweil approach to knowledge acquisition will fail. It might be possible to produce a kind of machine as idiot savant by scanning a library, but a judge would not have any more trouble distinguishing one from an ordinary human as she would with distinguishing a human idiot savant from a person not similarly afflicted. It is not in what the computer knows but what the computer does not know and cannot know wherein the problem resides.
• The brain's actual architecture and the intimacy of its interaction, for instance, with the endocrine system, which controls the flow of hormones, and so regulates emotion (which in turn has an extremely important role in regulating cognition) is still virtually unknown. In other words, we really don't know whether in the end, it's all about the bits and just the bits. Therefore Kurzweil doesn't know, but can only assume, that the information processing he wants to rely on in his artificial intelligence is a sufficiently accurate and comprehensive building block to characterize human mental activity.
• My prediction is that contemporary metaphors of brain-as-computer and mental activity-as-information processing will in time also be superceded [sic] and will not prove to be a basis on which to build human-level intelligent machines (if indeed any such basis ever exists).
• Without human experiences, a computer cannot fool a smart judge bent on exposing it by probing its ability to communicate about the quintessentially human.

Kapor's only hope in this bet depends on removing the "human experience/quintessence" decorations from his core claim that "a computer cannot fool a smart judge bent on exposing it".  There are no general-purpose LLMs in 2024 that could pass 2 hours of adversarial grilling by machine learning experts, and there probably won't be in 2029 either. But with sufficient RHLF investment, one could tune an LLM to be very hard to distinguish from a human foil -- even for ML experts. 

So Kurzweil arguably should win by the spirit of the bet, but whether he wins by the letter of the bet will depend on somebody tuning a specialized judge-fooling LLM. That investment might be far more than the $20K stakes. Such an LLM would not be general-purpose, because it would have to be dumbed-down and de-woked enough to not be useful for much else. 

I predict that by 2029 we will not yet have AGI as defined by OpenAI: highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work. A strong version of this definition would say "expert humans". A weak version would say "most humans" and "cognitive work". I don't think we'll have even such weak AGI by 2029. But beware the last-human-job fallacy, which is similar to the last-barrel-of-oil fallacy. AI will definitely be automating many human cognitive tasks, and will have radical impacts on how humans are employed, but AI-induced mass unemployment is unlikely in my lifetime. And mass unemployability is even less likely.

My Million Dollar Pandemic Mistake

I moved my 401Ks from equities to bonds on 2020-03-09, the week before the market bottom. For various reasons, I did not move back into equities until May 2021. I finally admitted to myself that I shouldn't try to avoid a market peak if I obviously couldn't avoid a market trough.

But my fundamental mistake wasn't merely that I tried to time (i.e. outsmart) the market. My real mistake was rationalizing the pandemic as a one-time excuse to end my 25-year streak of following Less Antman's investment strategy. Less explains it better than I could, below. (And no, I can't claim that his "check the stores" test justifies my mistake. I work in e-commerce, and we were never closed.)

(1) The wealth of a society is in the goods and services produced, and not in the monetary system. Check the stores: they're still open, providing lots of goods and services, and owning shares of the world's most profitable businesses makes your wealth as safe as the continued provision of those goods and services (if they disappear, money is useless).

(2) SOMEBODY has to own stocks at all times: the so-called "flight to quality" actually represents some people panicking out of the true source of wealth and handing ownership of these sources at fire sale prices to other people in exchange for green pieces of paper with pictures of presidents on them that aren't guaranteed to be redeemable for anything.  Someone once described a bear market as "that time period during which stocks are returned to their rightful owners."

(3) Diversify, diversify, diversify.  Own lots of businesses in lots of industries in lots of countries.

(4) The much higher rewards of equities over the long term result primarily from the uncertainty of returns over the short term.  Thank the volatility: it is your best friend in the end. Here is why:

Stockholders are owners of businesses, and owners get paid last, after employees, contractors, suppliers, and creditors. So changes in available revenue affect owners first, and that is the source of a great deal of uncertainty and occasional outright panic. Point granted: stocks are much more volatile than bonds and cash, and employees have a much more predictable flow of wages than their bosses do of dividends and capital gains. Yet since owners are paid last, in the long run they can be expected to be paid most — not always and certainly not in all companies, but for someone who owns a globally diversified portfolio of the world’s productive businesses, it’s a pretty good guess. My purpose in life is to tell my clients this as often as necessary.

So might I suggest that you remind yourself during scary times, why you’re invested in stocks? You’re providing the service of accepting the short-term uncertainty that others want to avoid. You’re the rock, the stable source of capital for businesses, without which market economies cannot function. Be a rock and react like a rock to the non-news that human nature goes through periodic bouts of extreme fear.

My 2021 Predictions

I had a good year for predictions. The only thing I got arguably wrong was to predict the jury would convict Rittenhouse on the weapons charge, but technically the prediction wasn't tested as the judge dismissed that charge before the jury could consider it. (I still would bet that the jury would say they would have convicted on that charge if it reached them.)

In March and April I was thinking there was a reasonable chance that SARS-CoV-2 was a lab leak. But after tuning into the debate on Twitter, by August my estimate was 20% and was still dropping in November. In December I said "Expect the CCP to successfully promote indefinite uncertainty".

In May I promoted an article by The Drive about adversary drone tech, and I said "I bet China, not aliens" are behind any serious phenomena that the Navy is seeing.  Now, per Mick West, I would rate mistaken identity even more likely than adversary tech for even the most interesting incidents.

In May there was a flurry of enthusiasm over a claim of fungal spheres growing on Mars. I unsuccessfully offered Robin Hanson 10:1 odds that this claim would fizzle quickly. Nobody seems to be talking about it any more.

In June I created a question on Metaculus about whether it will be widely accepted by 2030 that alien technology has visited our solar system. The community of 59 forecasters agrees with my prediction of 1% chance. If Metaculus allowed lower bets, I would say 1/1000.

In the run-up to the Pentagon's disappointing late-June release of UFO info, I successfully predicted in May that there would by Jan 1 (today) be no public

• CONTINUOUS multi-sensor track of hypersonic or hyper-G behavior
• sensor data contradicting Mick West's explanations of the 3 Navy videos
• imagery any harder to explain than the 3 Navy videos

Alas, I could not get any UFO enthusiasts to take bets on this.

In June I noted a shocking "big news" claim by anti-vaxxer Steve Kirsch about recent mortality data as the vaccines rolled out. An obscure Twitter user pointed out that the alleged anomaly was normal, and I successfully predicted his explanation would hold up.  Kirsch later deleted his "big news" tweet.

In November I successfully predicted the outcome of the Rittenhouse case and ensuing lack of riots. After the verdict I predicted that "2A advocates unfamiliar with Rittenhouse's internet footprint will be disappointed in him as a 2A poster child". The jury is still out on that one.

In November I endorsed the pre-omicron view that the ZeroCovid policies of China/Australia/NZ had clearly stopped making any sense. Omicron reinforces this view. It's going to be interesting if Omicron variolation combines with vaccination to finally turn Covid into "no worse than the flu".  Expect to hear "I told you so" from both China/NZ lockdown extremists as well as from anti-vax/anti-mandate extremists. I predict that everyone will end up believing they were right all along about this pandemic, which means that our species will be no better prepared for the next one.

After the SCOTUS abortion oral argument, I predicted on Dec 1 a 75% chance that the court will overturn Casey's viability line, and this will badly hurt the GOP.

In December I debunked a pro-vax claim about a 4-yr-old dying of Covid, but said that the rest of the list of 253 ["covidiot deaths"] at http://sorryantivaxxer.com are unlikely to be debunked.

In December I published my earlier conclusions on the identities of Q. I say there is only a 10% chance that any substantial fraction of Q's output was done independently of the team I identified. All five of my specific predictions about Trump/Q in that post will continue to hold up.

Q Unmasked

[These notes were drafted April 2021 but not cleaned up and posted because my interest in Q waned as QAnons largely stopped claiming Trump is still really president. Publishing now in Dec 2021 to summarize the available Q evidence. Nothing here is original/novel, but I haven't before seen this info collected in one place.][Dec 2022 update: excellent Q overview here.]

Summary

The original anonymous 4chan Q LARP was hijacked by Coleman Rogers and Paul Furber, who were joined by -- and later expelled by -- Ron Watkins and his father Jim (pictured above).

• 2017-10 Q begins as one of many anonymous 4chan LARPs (FBIAnon, HLIAnon, CIAAnon, CIA Intern, WH Insider Anon), probably as confessed by users Microchip and Dreamcatcher.
• 2017-11 Q identity is assumed by Coleman Rogers (PamphletAnon), working with Paul Furber (BaruchtheScribe), Rogers' wife Christina Urso (Radix) and perhaps Tracy Diaz (TracyBeanz) and Jerome Corsi. Ron Watkins (CodeMonkeyZ) soon joins the team.
• 2018-01 Q moves from 4chan to 8chan, controlled by Ron Watkins and his father Jim. Furber is expelled from Q, and claims Q is now an imposter.
• 2018-08 Rogers is expelled from Q, leaving the Watkins in control.

Timeline

• 2017-10-05 Trump: "Maybe it's the calm before the storm."
• 2017-10-28 #1 "HRC extradition already in motion"
• 2017-11 Rogers+Furber+Diaz create /r/CBTS_Stream
• 2017-11-09 #128 Q begins using Matlock tripcode
• 2017-11-25 Rogers+Furber+Diaz "gain control" of Q
• 2017-12-01c Q 1st post on 8chan CBTS
• 2017-12 Q changes tripcode to M@tlock!
• 2017-12 Jerome Corsi, Infowars
• 2018-01 Q moves from 4chan to 8chan with same tripcode
• 2018-01-05 Furber says original Q tripcode is compromised [e1 49m], Rogers disagrees
• 2018-01 Mon Furber removes both of Q's tripcodes
• 2018-01-09 Q joins Rogers' 8chan /thestorm #515 e153m
• 2018-03 /r/CBTS_Stream removed from reddit
• 2018-04 Corsi says imposter takes over Q
• 2018-04-08 #1082 JFKjr
• 2018-04 Rogers creates Patriots' Soapbox
• 2018-05-19 Q accidentally leaks too-long tripcode NowC@mesTHEP@in--23!!!
• 2018-06-15 Rogers "finds" anonymous Q post unsigned by tripcode
• 2018-07 /r/greatawakening removed from reddit
• 2018-09-18 #2224 /CM pls confirm #2226 Q knows # of IPs!
• 2018-12-12 Q says JFKjr not alive
• 2019-08 8chan goes offline
• 2019-11 8kun replaces 8chan
• 2020-02 Jim Watkins registers "Disarm the Deep State" PAC
• 2020-02-17 #3872 "Game Over" the day Fred Brennan flees Watkins-triggered prosecution in Philippines
• 2020-06-06 #4437 Q posts Python code
• 2020-07 Twitter bans 7K QAnon accounts
• 2020-12-08 last Q drop

Q Fails

• 2017-10-31 #15 The wizards and warlocks (inside term) will not allow another SATANic Evil POS control our country.
• 2020-06-04 #4414 Central communications blackout [never happened]
• 2020-06-11 #4455 What happens when Ds can no longer CHEAT ELECTRONICALLY? Push vote-by-mail? [Oops, Q ignorant of Dominion.]
• 2020-06-24 #4755 The 'Election Infection' cannot stop what is coming.
• 2020-09-16 #4722 They will: not concede on Election Night, contest this legally in battleground states, project doubt in the election results, organize massive riots. Playbook known. [Trump, not Dems, did all 4 of these things.]

Q Uninformed

• Q never mentioned Covid/pandemic until 2020-03-23. Q spent Jan-Feb of 2020 mostly talking about impeachment, and was unusually quiet in March. The "Plandemic" obviously surprised Q, who later said it was planned in advance to disrupt Trump re-election.
• Q never mentioned Hunter Biden until 2020-02-06.
• Q has never mentioned Dominion or Smartmatic.
• Q has never mentioned the 2019 Ukraine impeachment whistleblower Eric Ciaramella.
• Q has never mentioned Miles Taylor, the the HSA chief of staff who secretly wrote in 2018 in the NY Times "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration".

Q Was Not An Intelligence Insider

• Q chose to first go public on 4chan, a site full of racism and porn.
• Q's first 127 drops did not have any authentication (i.e. tripcode)
• Q's first tripcode ("Matlock") was chosen very poorly.
• Q did not understand that only the first 8 characters of a tripcode count, and instead chose longer passwords that gave no additional security.
• Q's passwords were known by random Qtuber Coleman Rogers.
• Q relied on easily-cracked site-specific tripcodes, instead of using off-the-shelf signing tech (e.g. PGP) that works securely and anonymously and portably.

Watkins == Q

• Q was suddenly so concerned about 4chan being "compromised", but had no such concern about Watkins' 8chan/8kun.
• After his problems with 4chan, Q had zero concern for establishing a method of identity verification independent of the Watkins.
• Coleman Rogers on a livestream was able to find and recognize a Q drop that someone had to point out to him was not signed? ("Oh, Q must have forgot to sign it.")
• Q did not post for the 3 months that 8chan was down? ("Nothing can stop what is coming" -- except the Watkins' inability to operate their site.)
• Q was able to post on the new Watkins 8kun site when most users couldn't.

Notes

• Watkins profits from QAnon
• 8chan/8kun advertising
• qmap.pub
• Goldwater news service
• "Disarm the Deep State" PAC
• Q never mentioned aliens, and said [#376] UFOs are a distraction

My Predictions

• Trump will never endorse Q and will disavow if asked directly, but will troll on this topic with weak interviewers/audiences.
• Trump will continue to claim credit for the Warp Speed vaccines, which will continue to be seen as wildly successful.
• Q will never resume classic Q posts claiming "the plan" is still in motion. That became untenable when it was apparent in early November that Trump would be leaving office Jan 20. Aside from a couple last "Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming" drops on Nov 12, the Q operation effectively shut down on election day 2020. And after Jan. 6 and the Dominion lawsuits, the Watkins know they cannot take the legal risk of resuming the old operation.
• Q will probably never post again on 8kun or any Watkins-controlled forum, as the Watkins do want to invite subpoenas for their hosting operations. And Q never took the obvious step of establishing an authentication identity independent of the Watkins, so Q is done.
• Q never had any access to insider government intel, and so will never be able to use such access to re-establish his identity on some post-Watkins channel. Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming -- except Q's amateurish inability to post independently of a pig-farming porn entrepreneur like Watkins.

Q Tripcodes

Matlock  > ITPb.qbhqo

M@tlock! > UW.yye1fxo

Freed@m- > xowAT4Z3VQ

F!ghtF!g > 2jsTvXXmXs

NowC@mes > 4pRcUA0lBE

StoRMkiL > CbboFOtcZs 

WeAReQ@Q > A6yxsPKia.

References

• 2021-01 Gospel According To Q - academic paper analyzing Q canon and stylometry. Includes charts of Q drops by tripcode, and Q aggregation sites.
• Qult_Headquarters - QAnon debunking subreddit
• 2020-12 QAnon Must Be Eliminated - screed purporting to trace the origins of Q
• 2020-04 questions about Q OpSec and adjacency to Watkins and porn
• 2019-06 list of failed Q predictions
• 2019-05 Paul Furber interview - alleges Q was hijacked 2018-01-05
• 2018-09-04 OAN Jack Posobiac interviews alleged original Q Microchip
• 2018-08 ground-breaking NBC analysis of Q origins: Rogers, Furber, Diaz
• 2018-08 list of failed Q predictions
• 2018-08 anonymous patriot's critique of Q OpSec e.g. tripcodes
• 2018-05 Tracy Diaz essay - denies Q complicity

Covid Vaccine Safety and Efficacy In Israel

The anti-vax group America's Frontline Doctors are promoting an article by Hervé Seligmann claiming that "the Pfizer vaccines, for the elderly, killed during the 5-week vaccination period about 40 times more people than the disease itself would have killed". The article makes a basic mistake that invalidates its main claim.

First, Seligmann makes an apples-to-oranges mistake by comparing Israeli vaccinations from Dec 19 to Feb 11 with a baseline of "death rates per day for unvaccinated are estimated for the 303 days from March 1 to December 20". (Ignore his mistake of saying "death rates per day", he meant "per-day death rates".) A big problem with that baseline is that the vaccinations were just getting started as Israel suffered a third wave of deaths that dwarfed the deaths from March 1 to Dec 20. That's like saying that aiming firehoses at a burning building must be the reason why more people trapped in the burning skyscraper died after the fire trucks arrived versus before.

The first drop of water from a firehose doesn't immediately extinguish a fire, and it's well-known that it takes several weeks for COVID-19 vaccines to reach full efficacy. During that time, it's expected that just-vaccinated people will be more vulnerable to COVID-19 than when the 2nd dose has been given its two weeks to fully kick in. 

Also, note that the earliest vaccines in Israel were given to the most vulnerable populations -- just as the third wave was heading for its peak. Seligmann's data conveniently ends at Feb 11, just as COVID-19 deaths per million in Israel were about to plummet. Israel reached 50% fully-vaccinated on Mar 16, and the data since Feb 11 indicate the exact opposite of the increased COVID-19 death risk that Seligmann claimed.

Indeed, thanks to Israel's data-intensive healthcare system, we now have detailed data on how COVID-19 differentially impacts unvaccinated people there. Studies published in Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine confirm the success of the Pfizer vaccine in Israel.

P.S. Table 1 in Seligmann's article strangely labels the first column as "community". Maybe this is a language/translation problem, but nowhere does he explicitly say that this column counts COVID-19 cases among people who have received vaccine injections but are not fully vaccinated. So for his denominator, he chose

• a vaccine-recipient population that is known to be skewed toward the most vulnerable, and
• systematically excluded its members once their vaccine reached effectiveness, and
• ended his data window just as Israel's death rate was about to plummet.

The meaning of his "community" column was only clarified after I finally found this detailed debunking of Seligmann written in German. (The Google translation is amazing, and actually reads more like native English than Seligmann's own paper.)

Update 12pm: Who debunks the debunkers? The German article makes a false claim here:

But ratios obviously matter more here than absolute numbers. The death rate among vaccinated COVID-19 victims was 709/54588 = 1.3%, while the rate among unvaccinated during the same period was 1566/368826 = 0.425%. However, note that the Pfizer vaccine efficacy in the 21 days between doses 1 and 2 is 52%. So to make the comparison fair, the denominator for the vaccinated case should include all the cases that the vaccine averted. This doubles the denominator, making the relevant 1-dose COVID-19 death rate be 0.65%.   That's only 50% higher than the unvaccinated COVID-19 death rate. That could potentially be explained by the fact that in Israel the vaccine was targeted early to the most vulnerable populations.

Israel's COVID-19 death graph above, with 2.5 months more data than the table above, shows that vaccines do not lead to more deaths from COVID-19. Some anti-vaxers have made a different claim: that vaccines will cause a spike in non-COVID-19 deaths. However, that claim is so far similarly contradicted by the excess-death data from the three countries that are making the most use of the most efficacious vaccines:

In the U.S., U.K., and Israel as of April 11, 156M distinct people had received a vaccine so far, while the population-weighted excess deaths among them had already become negative (as Israel's population is only 9M). As of yesterday, a total of 207M distinct people in those 3 countries have received a vaccination. When will all those "death jabs" ever cause the de-population that some anti-vaxers say the vaccine is engineered to do?

My prediction: in 2021-2023 there will be hysteresis pressure toward negative excess deaths in the U.S. because many of the pandemic deaths were among Americans likely to die in the coming years. Any spikes in excess deaths will be traceable to new variants that might develop, especially in the virus playground consisting of the world's unvaccinated people. But such spikes should be manageable, as emerging data suggests that the existing vaccines have some efficacy against variants. And since our most effective vaccines are based on the new nimble mRNA technology, it will be straightforward to create booster vaccines for problematic variants.

Taiwan Independence Is Not Worth A Cupertino

During the Cold War, it was fine for Taiwan to free-ride on America's anti-communist containment strategy, and to shelter under America's dominant nuclear umbrella. But the situation changed around the time the Cold War ended in 1989.

While communism as an ideology lost the Cold War, the Chinese Communist Party studiously avoided the Soviets' fate. The CCP adopted just enough market freedoms to generate the easy catch-up prosperity needed to bribe its recently-starving citizenry into continued servility. But the CCP's legitimacy also leans heavily on the idea that the evil capitalists and oppressors who took refuge in Taiwan must never gain independence. The CCP's propaganda has convinced its 1.4 billion citizens that Taiwan independence is an intolerable affront to Chinese national identity. Of course, the real problem is that Taiwan is more than 3 times more prosperous than China, and enjoys vastly more political freedom. Together, these two undeniable facts are an existential threat to the ideological legitimacy of the CCP.  For at least thirty years, the CCP leadership has known that they are only one Beijing Spring away from spending the rest of their lives in jail (or worse).

So the CCP leadership is playing for keeps in aspiring to finally complete the conquest of Taiwan. The American guarantee of Taiwan's defense was arguably a good idea back when it had almost no marginal cost. But now, a credible defense of Taiwan would cost America more than Americans (or the people of Taiwan!) are willing to pay. Even worse, it runs a constant and growing background risk of a catastrophic war that would stretch from the Taiwan Strait to at least Guam, inland China, Japan, Wall Street, near-Earth orbit, and cyberspace.

And it could easily lead to nuclear war. If China set up a sea and air blockade of Taiwan, the U.S. would have to either back down, or challenge this act of war by eventually shooting its way through the blockade. Win or lose, the resulting conventional war would be a catastrophe for America's economy. But worse, the war would be an existential threat to the CCP leadership. Military defeat would not be acceptable when they have a nuclear arsenal just sitting there. So they likely would nuke some mainland American target, or at least threaten to.

Which one? It would be a target with high strategic or economic value relative to civilian casualties. So forget Washington D.C. or Manhattan or any major metropolitan downtown. A lower-yield nuke into Pearl Harbor would mostly spare Honolulu, but the Pacific Fleet's carriers would once again not be present, and the historical precedent is not a good one. Hollywood would be an interesting economic/cultural target, but the population density is high, and the headline would be "L.A. Nuked". A better target would be anywhere along the 13-mile line from Sand Hill Road to Santa Clara Stadium. That line is the backbone of Silicon Valley: venture capital, Stanford University, the Page Mill Rd. Stanford business park, the Google campus, and the remainders of the Valley's aerospace and semiconductor industry. That's where South Korea might aim a trans-Pacific nuke if it could. But China would instead be tempted to aim five miles south, and take out the Apple campus in Cupertino -- especially if they thought it would help them dominate the smartphone industry.

Whatever target they chose, America would be much more averse to this escalation than would the CCP. And so America should game this out, and cut its losses. There is no strategic hope for the 24M people of Taiwan to remain independent from those whose control of 1.4B Chinese depends on a commitment to ending that independence.

Taiwan has been a losing hand since the Berlin Wall fell and China's market economy rose. It's just an accident of geography that the CCP victory in 1949 was not total. When the freedom of Taiwan was relatively cheap to guarantee, it was worth guaranteeing. But it's not worth sacrificing a Cupertino.

This is not yet understood -- neither in official Washington nor in Taiwan itself. More than half of the people of Taiwan expect America to fight for their independence, but the people of Taiwan are unwilling to mount a credible deterrent.  So some U.S. president should say publicly what Trump said privately: "Taiwan is like two feet from China. We are 8,000 miles away. If they invade, there isn’t a f***ing thing we can do about it."

Why Age Of Em Will Not Happen Soon

You cannot resume a human mind from static imagery of a brain, any more than you can resume the apps running on your smartphone from static imagery of your phone's circuitry.

The FBI confronted this reality when trying to crack the San Bernardino shooters' iPhone.

The 2008 Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap seems to completely miss this point, except perhaps in its handwaving appendix on "non-destructive and gradual replacement". Those fantasies will eventually be realized, and only then will minds be able to be hibernated (and thus cheaply and quickly copied.)

So the Age of Em is extremely unlikely to happen in the manner and timeframe that the brilliant Robin Hanson expects.

There is in principle a way around this hibernation problem. You just have to emulate the entire development of a brain, and then feed it a suitable lifetime of input to train it into a desired state. This approach is computationally more expensive, and would require lots of slow (and morally objectionable!) iterations. Or you could try to bypass the iterations by instrumenting various (by definition unwilling) human subjects and log a few decades of their sensory inputs.  Thus you'd only be able to emulate the, um, victims of your experiments, rather than emulating arbitrary cognitive superstars.  Still, you'd be able to cheaply and quickly make copies of them, and an Age Of Emulated Boys From Brazil would then be possible.

Handicapping the PlatCom Survey

Platform Committee Chair Alicia Mattson has sent an email out through official LP channels asking party members to take a survey about the purpose and scope of the Platform. Presumably to avoid having to get a majority of PlatCom to agree to its content, she apparently (and perhaps wisely) did not seek input from any other PlatCom members. Here are the substantive questions, along with my answers and predictions about results.

1. Platforms serve both internal and external purposes. &Which of the following more closely represents your opinion about what should be the principal purpose of our party platform?
a) Our platform should be more of an externally-focused document to market our party to voters.
b) Our platform should be more of an internally-focused document to guide our candidates.

I voted (b), even though it's apparently designed to be the radical choice. Our platform should be a statement of our common principles. It should guide our candidates and marketers, not replace them or dictate to them. I bet about 60% of NatCon delegates would vote (a).

2. Our platform will be read by those who are familiar with our ideas and those who are not. Who do you believe should be our principal target?
a) We should target individuals unfamiliar with (or even opposed to) our ideas so we can educate them on the merits of libertarianism.
b) We should target individuals already sympathetic with our ideas to convince them to vote for our candidates.

I think I voted (a). I don't like either choice. Our principle target should be anyone who wonders what the LP stands for. (a) might get more votes, but it will be close as I doubt many will love either choice.

3. Shorter documents are more likely to be read, while longer documents are more likely to be comprehensive. If you had to select only one, which one of the following more closely represents your opinion about the optimal length of our platform?
a) A short platform covering fewer issues.
b) A long platform covering more issues.

I voted for the radical (b) choice, even though what I prefer is a short platform covering more issues. This clearly shows that Alicia was not trying to rig the quiz to favor the short Pure Principles draft that PlatCom is moving toward. (a) will probably get more votes.

4. Our platform uses a combination of negative and positive phrasing, i.e. what we oppose and what we champion. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion as to the language phrasing that should be used mostly in our platform?
a) We should emphasize what we oppose in government and the harm it causes.
b) We should emphasize what we favor in a free society and the benefits this brings.

Another blatantly non-rigged question. I reluctantly voted for the less-radical (b), even though I oppose filling the Platform with marketing fluff that vouches for the benefits of our principles. (b) will win handily, but the result won't support our Pure Principles draft as much as another question might have.

5. We know that libertarianism is both morally right and improves the lives of the greatest number of people. &Which of the following more closely represents your opinion as to the language phrasing that should be used mostly in our platform?
a) We should emphasize the moral justification for our views.
b) We should emphasize the utilitarian benefits of our positions to the reader.

Yet another non-rigged question! I reluctantly voted for the radical (a) choice, but the Pure Principles draft eschews both philosophical justifications and utilitarian vouching. (b) should edge (a).

6. Some people believe our existing platform language can be repaired through a series of amendments. Others believe that we need to delete the old language and start anew. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion about how to better fix our platform?
a) We should amend the existing language.
b) We should delete the old planks and start from a clean slate.

I voted for (b), which should get a majority, but some will interpret this as support for writing a marketing brochure instead of adopting the Pure Principles draft. Sigh.

7. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion about how we should address controversial issues where there is not the bylaws-required 2/3 support among our delegates to state one position or another in our platform?
a) The platform should be silent on such issues, only emphasizing areas of internal party agreement.
b) To generate 2/3 support and avoid being silent on such issues, compromise language for the platform should be crafted that acknowledges there is more than one acceptable position.

Radicals will not like either choice, but I don't have a clear favorite. I voted for (b), but my preference is to state the core of agreement whenever possible -- which includes pretty much every issue except abortion, the death penalty, and some miscellaneous ones like intellectual property. (a) will probably win.

8. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion about how much implementation detail should be included in our platform planks?
a) We should include very little to no implementation detail. State only the general principles and leave it to our candidates to address how to implement them.
b) We should provide comprehensive details on how to implement each plank.

Finally, a question that can help the Pure Principles draft. :-) I voted for (a), which will win convincingly.

9. Some topics are included in a platform because they satisfy an internal party constituency. Some topics are included in a platform because they will appeal to voters. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion about the types of topics that should be emphasized in the platform?
a) We should emphasize topics that are appealing to voters.
b) We should emphasize topics that appeal to internal party constituencies.

I reluctantly voted for the radical (b), because I oppose the brochure intent underlying (a) -- which will win due to the phrasing.

10. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion as to how far-reaching plank language should be?
a) We should be destination oriented, describing how we want society to ultimately appear.
b) We should be directionally oriented, emphasizing what Libertarian officeholders can reasonably achieve over the next few years.

I reluctantly voted for (b), even though I oppose the "next few years" part. The idea of the Pure Principles draft is "timeless directional principles", emphasizing neither destination nor near-term transition. (b) will eke out a majority, and this will be yet another part of the quiz that rekindles the hopes of exuberant moderates who think that in Denver we can pass a Platform written as a brochure or a Contract With America. We can't, and we shouldn't try.

11. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion as to how we should handle subjects for which mainstream Libertarian thought is at odds with what most voters want?
a) We should be silent on those issues.
b) We should state our positions on those issues.

I reluctantly voted for the more radical (b), only because of the qualifier "mainstream". This vote will be close.

Democrats Not Nominating Their Best Demagogue

In May I predicted "Edwards would beat any Republican, Giuliani would beat any other Democrat, and Obama would beat Romney or McCain, who each would beat Hillary." I still think that's right, and I don't quite understand why the Democrats aren't going to nominate the most skilled demagogue in the race. Here's John Edwards flat-out lying through his teeth even as he lectures his competitors about telling "the truth":

  

The American people deserve to hear the truth. They have heard so much politician double-talk on this issue. That's the reason young people don't believe Social Security is going to be there for them. Why would you possibly trust a bunch of politicians who say the same thing over and over and over? "We're going to grow our way out of this," but nothing changes. Nothing changes. The honest truth is: There are hard choices to make be made here. The choice I would make as president of the United States is on the very issue that you've asked about, which is the cap. And I have to say, I have some difference with my friend, Chris Dodd, who I agree with a lot. But I don't understand why somebody who makes $50 million a year pays Social Security tax on the first $97,000 and somebody -- and not on the rest -- while somebody who makes $85,000 a year pays Social Security tax on every dime of their income.

But of course John Edwards understands why Social Security payroll taxes are capped -- it's because Social Security benefits are capped, so that people in the same age cohort who make similar "contributions" get similar benefits when they retire. He surely cannot claim to be ignorant of the central and fundamental premise of Social Security: that it is social "insurance" financed with premium-like "contributions", and not simply a scheme to soak the rich and the young in order to buy votes from the not-rich and not-young. When a benefit is financed according to ability to pay instead of by some function (however tenuous) of the amount one has contributed, then it loses all pretense of being "insurance", and is exposed as unabashed income redistribution and shameful rent-seeking. Thus John Edwards is either a lying demagogue, or is too colossally ignorant to be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office. I leave it as an exercise for the reader whether being a wealthy trial lawyer correlates with 1) the ability to manipulate jurors with affectations of ignorance or 2) actual colossal ignorance.