enoch_r

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.

Sorry for the lack of clarity.

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.

This doesn't appear to be true at all. Do you have a source?

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?

Do you think that car seat mandates (up to age 12 in my state) are good policy if the net effect is:

- a small reduction in minor injuries,

- worse childhoods and parenting experiences (difficult to quantify, but real),

- and a few hundred thousand fewer children being born in the first place,

- very few, if any, lives saved?

If yes, then cool - but I strongly disagree.

If no - then I think the evidence and details very much matter, and that's why I was happy to invest my time in them.

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..."

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.