Before I would just throw prompts at the LLM and it'd end up building a pile of crap (but semi-working crap, and 100x faster than I ever could) - it was pretty depressing. Using tools like `grill-me` (or `grill-with-docs`) I feel like I'm actually building my understanding of the system and helping shape it, and the results are much better.
LLMs are trained to convince a typical human to click the "I like this one better" on their response.
Convincing a human law professor to click the "I would prefer to deliver this response to a student" button, and to not click the "this response is pedagogically harmful" button is a different task!
I could imagine an LLM convincing a typical human to click the "I like this one better" button with flattery, or with nice-sounding platitudes, or with hand-wavey explanations that sound plausible. And in fact that's exactly what LLMs do when they go wrong - they bluff and output superficially plausible nonsense!
But these weren't typical humans, these were law professors specifically tasked with deciding which response was a better option to give to students as a canonical answer to a contract law question. So I think this is a genuinely impressive result.
1. some people argue that the implication of this (along with other deaths of science-adjacent people) is that there's a murder campaign against scientists
2. but this "implication" is actually completely innumerate, and in reality the implication is something like "within a large population, you would expect some people to be murdered or commit suicide."
I looked at the whole context of responses to the post before my post, so (1) seemed obvious to me, and I was mostly following on with (2), but I see that it was confusing. :)
Conspiracy theorists don't understand base rates and denominators. They make a list of deaths of people who seem vaguely STEM/"government secret" adjacent and forget to think about what their denominator is. Implicitly, it's "all employees (at all levels) of government labs, plus associate-director-and-up employees at STEM companies, plus all academics working in STEM fields, plus anyone who was formerly in one of these categories."
When you write it out like that, it's obvious that the denominator is ridiculously large and that it would be much more difficult to explain a lack of deaths in such a pool over a ~3 year period.
The missing worker here is typically included in the lists of "suspicious deaths" because she was an administrative assistant at Los Alamos (a government lab).
Exactly what pool of people are we drawing from here? How big is our denominator?
- Anthony Chavez was a foreman supervising construction at Los Alamos. Retired in 2017.
- Melissa Casias (from this article) was an administrative assistant at Los Alamos.
- Steven Garcia was a "property custodian at KCNSC."
- Jason Thomas was associate directory of chemical biology at Novartis (pharma company) on cancer treatment.
- McCasland retired 13 years before he went missing.
- Nuno Loureiro was a plasma physicist at MIT.
So the denominator here has to include:
- current and former employees (at all levels, including clerical positions like Melissa Casias or construction workers like Anthony Chavez) of government research facilities
- management at pharmaceutical companies (or presumably, other STEM companies as well?).
- academics working in STEM fields (MIT plasma physicist Nuno Loureiro)
So you have to ask yourself two questions:
- how big is the pool that we're drawing these deaths from? and
- given a pool of this size, how many people in it would you expect to die in a ~3 year period?
To me the answer is really boring - this number of deaths is just utterly unsurprising. It honestly doesn't even rise to the level of being a "coincidence." It's a complete non-event.
As someone who lives in the US I'd kind of prefer if people didn't flippantly mislead my countrymen to claim that assassinations are beneficial. I found zero sources on Wikipedia for what you claimed. Seriously, if you are too "bothered" to look up any source for an empirical claim, perhaps you should reconsider posting the claim in the first place.
Here are several articles about denial increases in the time immediately following Thompson's death:
The claim was not "UHC made prior authorization easier for many procedures," the claim was "rejection rates by health insurance companies plummeted." I found several sources claiming that denial rates increased following the assassination:
In this conversation, you have repeatedly referred to "all of the data" and "mountains of data," yet you have posted none. Meanwhile I have posted every major study on both sides of the debate! Your argument seems to be that:
- the experts have told people to use car seats
- experts wisely base policy on "all of the data"
- therefore, "all of the data" must support the claim that car seats save lives
If we're going to discuss the question of whether experts have set policy well or poorly in a particular case, then such a strong prior on "experts always set policy well and based on the best available evidence" kind of assumes the conclusion, doesn't it?
What articles did you find, exactly? What primary evidence are they basing their claims on? Many of the numbers you'll find with a google search are unclear about what they're comparing to - I believe both of the fatality numbers above (71% and 54%) are relative to completely unrestrained kids, which is not the relevant comparison.
The 45% number I specifically discuss in the other comment, but every independently reproducible study using publicly available data has found much smaller effects, around 10-25% for minor injuries and no statistically significant difference in severe injuries.
To be clear, I'm not saying "don't use car seats," I'm saying that the evidence doesn't support mandating them through age 8 (or 12!).
Our kids would be much safer if we drove everywhere at 15mph - less convenient, but it would prevent many unnecessary deaths. Unfortunately, it is impossible to do anything in the world without risk. So we're forced to balance convenience against safety every day, whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not.
The evidence that car seats save lives is significantly weaker that you probably believe, as I detailed in another comment in this thread. But look: even if car seats make sense for a typical 5 year old on a typical drive in their typical car (which is a higher evidentiary burden than you might think), a mandate imposes a huge logistical tax that makes many normal things completely infeasible or impractical:
- travel with many kids (nope, physically can't carry 4 car seats plus luggage)
- using a taxi, e.g. to go see a movie (nope, can't carry a car seat into the theater)
- carpooling with other families (I'll drive them, you pick up? Nope, we'd have to shuffle car seats around.)
- rides with grandparents or other family members (sorry, we'd have to deliver the car seat to them first)
- splitting kids between two vehicles for errands (let's spend 10m wrestling car seats from one car to the other first)
The whole texture of independent childhood is altered by car seat mandates! Everything gets filtered through "is there a car seat available?". If you haven't experienced this, it's hard to describe - and I think it's absolutely a case where tradeoffs like "how will this affect quality of life?" are completely overridden because "well, if it just saves one life..."
We have 4 kids. Before we had our 3rd, we needed to buy a new vehicle solely because we couldn't fit 3 car seats into the back of our old car. And when traveling with kids, carrying 4 gigantic car seats plus your other luggage is not exactly as easy as you might think! It essentially rules out solo parent travel with all 4 kids. Transferring car seats between two cars, or installing car seats in a taxi, is a serious pain.
Furthermore, the evidence that car seats actually benefit safety is significantly less robust than you might think. The "mountains of evidence" that do exist for things like 70% reductions in fatalities, bizarrely enough, generally compare the rate of fatalities for car seats vs completely unrestrained kids. When you compare the rate of fatalities in car seats to kids wearing adult seat belts, the bulk of the evidence suggests essentially no difference. Fatalities happen when the forces involved are catastrophic and sadly a car seat doesn't help much for kids over 2.
Even a back of the envelope comparison makes this extremely plausible: car crash fatalities for kids 9-12 have declined by 72% from 1978-2017. If car seats and car seat laws save significant numbers of lives, you'd expect that the fatality rate for kids 0-8, who are generally in car seats, to have decreased much more. But it hasn't, it declined by 73% over the same period.
Now, car seats and boosters do seem to moderately reduce non-fatal injuries - huge spread of estimates here, most clustering around 10-25%. It's reasonable for most people to use car seats or boosters most of the time based on this alone, IMO, especially for young kids. But do they justify a mandate? IMO: no. Absolutely not.
Worth mentioning that mandates probably do succeed in one thing: they reduce the number of children born at all by at least 57x more than they prevent child fatalities. Roughly 8,000 kids per year, 145,000 kids since 1980. That's with the (unlikely, as discussed above) assumption that car seats do in fact save significant numbers of lives. But it's also entirely possible that they've prevented hundreds of thousands of kids from being born, somewhat reduced the nonfatal injury rate, and saved essentially no lives.
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 (car seat mandates "led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000")
Note that both the 45% and 59% estimate for injury reduction and the 28% estimate for fatality reduction all come from one research group using a proprietary data set. Everything that's independently reproducible points towards small or zero effect on fatalities and modest effects on injuries.
We're obviously richer, too. Your grandparents had a cozy house - did they have good fresh food all winter when growing up? Could they keep food from going bad in the summer? What about indoor plumbing? These things are so ubiquitous now it's hard to even remember that they aren't just part of the basic fabric of reality.
It's easy to look back with nostalgia (and literal survivor bias - "my ancestors all survived") at the past. But if you actually look at history you will see that "what people have had for millenia" was ... pretty awful. It's an AMAZING time to be alive.
Say I own a spoon company. The government says "hey, I'd like to buy a million spoons from you!" I say "sure, sounds great." We sign a contract stating that I'll give them 1M spoons and they'll send me $1M.
Then the government comes to me and says "hey, actually, turns out we need 500,000 forks and 300,000 knives and only 200,000 spoons."
I say "no, we are a spoon company. Very passionate about spoons. Producing forks and knives would be an entirely different business, and our contract was for spoons."
The military now threatens to destroy my company unless I give them forks and knives instead of spoons.
You say "the voters and congress tell the military how to use utensils, not SpoonCo. Shifting the decision to SpoonCo takes power away from the citizenship."
The military can sign contracts if they wish! They can decline to sign contracts if they wish!
But private citizens can also choose whether to sign or not sign contracts with the military. Threatening to destroy their business if they don't sign contracts the military likes (or to renegotiate existing contracts in the military's favor) is a huge violation.
I'm not saying that Gazan civilians deserve to suffer because they voted for Hamas. I am saying that Hamas tries to inflate the death toll for Gazan civilians (both by lying about that toll, and by taking actions with the express purpose of increasing that toll).
If you refuse to go to war with Hamas because of this fact, you incentivize that behavior.
I can't really think of a more just case for war than "the government of a neighbor just brutally, intentionally slaughtered civilians in a surprise attack in our country." It doesn't matter whether the neighboring country is a dictatorship or a democracy.
It very much sucks for the people of Palestine that Hamas chose to start a war with Israel and is using tactics that purposefully result in the death of Palestinians. I hope that they stop putting rocket launchers in and next to schools. I hope that they start allowing people to evacuate. I hope that they stop lying to their people about "psychological warfare" in an effort to get more of them killed. I wish that neighboring countries would allow Palestinians to escape the carnage, and adopt strategies that actually support the Palestinian people rather than the Palestinian cause.
But the IDF and Israel do not control that. And I'm honestly not sure what people expect from them. If you can't fight an enemy that hides behind civilians, then hiding behind civilians is an obvious winning strategy. And personally, I don't want to live in a world where the government most willing to sacrifice their own people automatically wins any conflict.
The numbers we have for IDF civilian deaths in Gaza come from the governmental authority in Gaza. That government authority happens to be Hamas.
- Hamas falsely attributes civilian deaths to Israel (as you can see from the "hospital strike")
- Hamas vastly inflates civilian casualty counts, somewhere between 2-5x as you can also see from the "hospital strike" which was immediately claimed by Hamas to have killed more than 500. US estimates have it between 100-300, and I think the photos of the damaged parking lot are extremely damning for Hamas's claims - yes, an explosion and fire in a crowded refugee camp could kill lots of people, but 500 is absurd.
- Hamas tells civilians in Gaza to ignore text messages from the IDF telling them to evacuate because their residence may be bombed.
- Hamas sets up road blocks to prevent civilians in Gaza from evacuating.
- Hamas sets up military installations and ammunition caches next to or in civilian installations, including kindergartens and mosques. (You can find videos of bombings resulting in massive secondary explosions as ammunition caches pop off.) They hide in refugee camps (https://thehill.com/policy/international/4260111-israel-hama...).
I think it's worth asking whether there is any way to wage a just war against a government like this, that is literally trying to maximize the number of its own civilians killed. And if not, what kinds of behavior does that incentivize?
> I have always viscerally opposed war. I have dedicated my life to conflict resolution and reconciliation.
> But in the coming Gaza genocide, every act of armed resistance by Hamas and Hezbollah will have my support.
> If that is a crime, send me back to jail.
I think this is pretty clearly supporting Hamas. The "in the coming" bit gives him a bit of leeway, of course, since he's not actually saying he supported the October 7 massacre itself (though presumably he is saying he would support another one, if it were it to occur now?), but he certainly doesn't seem to be making the sort of "I support Palestinians, not Hamas" argument that you assume.
Personally, as an American, I've been told by Europeans here that our attitudes towards free speech are bizarre, and that government has an important role to play in, ah, curating the information ecosystem. Despite that, I still believe that people like Murray should be perfectly free to argue for their views, however much I personally find them abhorrent.
Before I would just throw prompts at the LLM and it'd end up building a pile of crap (but semi-working crap, and 100x faster than I ever could) - it was pretty depressing. Using tools like `grill-me` (or `grill-with-docs`) I feel like I'm actually building my understanding of the system and helping shape it, and the results are much better.