Having read the post, I confess I have no idea what the reasoning
here is even supposed to be.
u/DELETED66 pointsat 1581727918.000000
I’m not a [person trained in an empirical profession], so I can’t
speak much to [empirical] solutions. But I am a [grifter], so I can
speak to [the grift].
Except this is also bad economics. I'm not a [profession] but I'm also not a [another profession], but we should [course of action bad by both perspectives].
Idea: Pay young people to get infected. They are very likely to
survive, and to not even require hospitalization, and you’ll also reduce
r0 into the bargain more than you otherwise would
Gotta love how they assume for no reason that their nonsense ideas
about free market economics are a suitable stand in for virology, social
science, and pretty much every other academic field.
How will that reduce R0 in a way that matters??? It's not like the virus days, welp, had a bunch of cases that didn't get transmitted to new people, guess I won't be as infectious in the wild now
I think the idea is that if you infect and then immediately quarantine young people, they won't become disease vectors, and they're the most common disease vectors so infectiousness should decrease. This is only true under certain assumptions about how the virus spreads but the logic isn't immediately wrong in itself, they're just misusing the term R0.
Yeah, the idea is blatantly untenable, which is one of the reasons why public health officials have never tried anything even remotely like this. Unfortunately, Robin Hanson is very silly when it comes to heuristically analyzing his ideas to discard the obviously bad ones.
Yeah probably. There's another unstated assumption here that you can't be infected twice, which even Robby acknowledges is a complete guess. I think he got called out for this on Twitter.
Welcome, to [sneerclub](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKfupO4ZzPs). Just be happy that SC doesn't keep extensive receipts of every bad thing rationals and rationalist adjacent people have said, because yikes.
Well I saw some disturbing shit back in the day... there was this super rational guy Mary Sue person in an Y story, who stabbed and raped someone.
Then there were some idiots discussing how rational it would be to go all sarah connor on semiconductor companies, then none other than Scott suggested they'd use "tobacco executives" as a code word because, you know, FBI (avoiding the words "code word" etc of course). I found that when figuring out why libertarians would talk trolley problem of tobacco executives all of a sudden. If I recall correctly none other than Scott also kept bullshitting how this is not what it looks like despite the code words being his contribution to the glorious cause.
Why semiconductor companies? Because of the AI thing? Getting on no-fly lists because of AGI fears is quite the achievement.
And I always hate people trying to bullshit that their codeworks don't mean what they mean. It is always pretty obvious. (Anarchists also do it with all cops are bastards, by pretending it means all cats are beautiful, and then act all kinds of hurt when the cops still put them in jail for their insults). Same with neo-nazis and 'googles' btw (which is codeword for black people or something I think (sadly, in the case of neo-nazis it isn't that stupid from them, as it prevents automatic systems from picking up on it, any human reading easily knows what is up of course)).
Yeah, because of the AI thing, although I don't think anyone ended up on a no fly list.
One of the discussions captured by dgerard back when: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/File:Capture_d3f4851dc5da36fcbe4dae9992d74d2772191c41.png . The "they are building skynet right now" piece a little bit from the top.
Like, what would it cost this little fucker to just regurgitate a bit of standard psych advice instead of doing the equivalent of telling a delusional patient that it would make sense to use a wooden stake if they ever became sure that someone is a vampire. Sorry, this still pisses me off.
> Sorry, this still pisses me off.
Nah, [no worries, a psych should know better](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7NzBTRzCkg).
Also, 'Rational terrorism', sigh.
That wasn't even their first conversation on that topic, or the last... one time Y had to wink wink denounce that crap, while doing which he couldn't keep himself from saying something to the sense that in the alternative that there was a secret plan then it would've also been stupid to talk about it in the open. (Somehow it would still be pure genius to allude to secret plans via alternatives though). This is what changed my opinion on them from "mostly harmless if yucky at times dorks, with a dose of grift" to "hey this is actually more serious than that".
(edit: in the sense that they could have talked some crazy person into doing something, and that despite all the ways an unabomber listing them in a manifesto would upset their comfortable status quo they still could not avoid doing any idiotic winks and nods at the crazies).
I haven't been following them lately, although recent advances in deep learning do make me wonder what kind of nonsense they are up to, besides smugness about Elon Musk freaking out.
I can hardly believe you've spent so long around these fucks and never seen Robin "Cucked By My Own Cuck" Hanson's *important deep thinking* on these matters.
Now that I think about it, I may have seen it at some point. I think it may have been some kind of saturation effect with all the other insane shit, preventing me from remembering it well or even prioritizing the crazier things in memory.
I do recall pissing them off, on purpose, by straight-facedly arguing their own Darwinist points but applied to cucks, i.e. how important it is for natural selection yadda yadda how without sexual selection we probably would never have evolved intelligence etc. But that was in comments to another blog post with something about high status doctors being biased because they're high status and would get more sex or something. You could tell when someone's torn between having to argue their MRA point, and wishing they could argue my point because ("signalling" being a projection) that would've been how they'd "signal" they're better genetic material.
I thought the title of this thread was sarcastic or satirical, but
no, he’s literally saying that we should deliberately spread the
coronavirus and infect large groups of people at once.
I don’t have a detailed plans to offer,
Yeah, I kind of figured. If he spent time thinking about it, it would
have been too difficult to justify going ahead and posting this
article.
and obviously any such plans should be considered very carefully.
Hopefully by someone else.
And obviously, they might face a much opposition.
‘Might’?
If they were designed or implemented badly, they might even make
things worse.
‘Might’?!
But the alternative is to risk having large fractions of the
population get sick at once,
‘Alternative’?
My theory — he came up with the concept first (“you know how everyone
is against the coronavirus? What if they were all wrong??”) and then
worked backward to come up with a plausible scenario that would justify
this post.
In fairness, “What if everyone was wrong about X?” is a pretty normal way to start scientific inquiry. It’s just that when reputable people do it, it looks nothing like this.
Maximize exposure of the public to your viral stupidity by just having the weirdest dumbest opinions. This is just rationalist clickbait. (Note the first paragraph already has [citation needed] and doesnt make sense. (Just because people in the past did something, doesnt make it smart).
I could probably argue to Hanson that it doesn't have a right to live, since it must live within me, but I can't charge it rent. The ultimate freeloader.
As of yesterday total known deaths were 1384, a number that’s had a
six day doubling time lately. At that rate, in four months deaths go up
by a factor of a million, which is basically the whole planet. So unless
growth rates slow by over a factor of four, there’s probably not time
for a vaccine to save us.
https://twitter.com/slothfulApe/status/1228531749031825408?s=20
> You seem to take a lot of satisfaction from publicly making provocative statements. It’s pretty hard to take a whiny tweet like this seriously in light of that history.
I also would not be nice to him irl after he seriously brought up this argument tbh.
I feel like I’m reading Dr. Hammond’s plan to improve security at
Jurassic Park. Rather than contain the virus to one place, let’s contain
the the virus to lots of different places simultaneously. What could go
wrong??
I’m not a medical professional, so I can’t speak much to medical
solutions.
You’re right. We should probably ask people who actually work on
these questions as a career, like the CDC and FEMA. Never mind,
they aren’t rationalists.
I’m not a [person trained in an empirical profession], so I can’t speak much to [empirical] solutions. But I am a [grifter], so I can speak to [the grift].
A gem from the comments:
Gotta love how they assume for no reason that their nonsense ideas about free market economics are a suitable stand in for virology, social science, and pretty much every other academic field.
I thought the title of this thread was sarcastic or satirical, but no, he’s literally saying that we should deliberately spread the coronavirus and infect large groups of people at once.
Yeah, I kind of figured. If he spent time thinking about it, it would have been too difficult to justify going ahead and posting this article.
Hopefully by someone else.
‘Might’?
‘Might’?!
‘Alternative’?
My theory — he came up with the concept first (“you know how everyone is against the coronavirus? What if they were all wrong??”) and then worked backward to come up with a plausible scenario that would justify this post.
Trolling effort - 3 out of 5 stars
Does Robin Hanson just spend his time coming up with arguments for the least agreeable conclusions he can think of?
Galaxy-brained libertarianism: the government should infect people with deadly viruses for the greater good.
https://xkcd.com/605/
bonus via twitter: why are people being so rude to me about my suggestion to infect people with a potentially deadly disease
I feel like I’m reading Dr. Hammond’s plan to improve security at Jurassic Park. Rather than contain the virus to one place, let’s contain the the virus to lots of different places simultaneously. What could go wrong??
You’re right. We should probably ask people who actually work on these questions as a career, like the CDC and FEMA. Never mind, they aren’t rationalists.
Engineer brain strikes once again! Although it appears that the whole profession of economics has contracted this disease
This is dumb as shit even by Robin Hanson standards.
He’s crazy.
I wonder how Hanson would feel about his extended family serving as the initial trial run for this proposal.
I saw this on Twitter and knew it would be posted here. Prime SneerClub material.
https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1229004495302074368
Fascilities lmao, the guy has to be trolling.
idk why you guys take him seriously anymore. I’m almost certain that his goal is to contrarian troll everyone
I feel bad for Hanson in that he clearly has some issues (which he often talks about). At the very least, a massive chip on his shoulder…