Benjamin is a humongous meme on that subreddit. He willingly doxxes most details of his personal life. He's posted essentially his address and once even posted a live GPS tracker of his phone that was up for several days. He talks about his place of employment and his weirdest thoughts about his roomates and their romantic relationships. He is also a moderator of r / antiPsychiatry
Its honestly kind of messed up
Bonus
ass-pulled ‘equation’ from a user who talked this out with a friend who
got his BS in biology, and some bullshit
percentages from another commenter.
The post got featured on the front page (despite LW’s policy to not
feature COVID-related content) as ‘the rationality life lessons seemed
pretty timeless’.
> a friend who got his BS in biology
None of this seems to actually use any biology knowledge, though. It looks like it's some kind of attempt at probability from someone who doesn't know math - maybe that was the biologist friend?
Speaking as a guy with an MSc in philosophy of science - not pulling rank here, just making a point - until you’re studying for a graduate degree or otherwise spending pretty much every day acquiring new knowledge and technical skills: you don’t know shit, and even after that I don’t know shit, in fact I wrote a whole very well received essay that people who think they know shit don’t know shit, which got me into Edinburgh as a graduate student
word.
people just don't get that.
one of the best experiences in gradschool is lab meetings where we scrutinize and find the mistakes of papers in top impact factor journals.
it really makes me shake my head when those rationalists self proclaimed autodidact experts think they are on the same level.
Are we not going to discuss that an input was percent chance the vaccine works which they estimated to be ~33% based on number of other vaccines that pass clinical trials. As if that’s how things work.
This is amazing, the dude does not really conceive of a real
possibility this all fails:
If the vaccine induces an immune response in the blood, then it
almost certainly induces one in the mucus lining, but the reverse does
not hold. So a positive blood antibody test means it definitely works, a
negative antibody test is a weak update against.
Yeah, and since it’s only a weak update:
If that test comes back negative, then the next test will be the
“more dakka” test. We’ll add the other three peptides, take another few
weeks of boosters, maybe adjust frequency and/or dosage - we’ll consider
exactly what changes to make if and when the optimistic test comes back
negative. Risks are very minimal (again, see the paper), so throwing
more dakka at it makes sense.
Coolio, mate. Cool cool cool. Literally no way this could be
defeated by the evidence.
Yeah some seriously dumb shit. I looked at the website he got the idea from, they claim to have over a hundred people self administer and also have zero evidence it works.
Like, don't you think at that point that if it wasn't total bullshit then someone with enough lab access to verify it works, would have tried?
It's not even like they're trying to go for something easy and straightforward, they are trying to make it snortable.
I have a good friend who’s into this stuff. He’s a great guy but when the conversation turns to it I just switch off until I can be bothered to be back in the room again. The problem is it *sounds* technical and whatever but obviously it’s just scoffed out of something he scanned online.
I imagine, a year or two from now, looking back and grading my COVID
response. When I imagine an A+ response, it’s something like “make my
own fast tests, and my own vaccine,
You know… You know what I’ve noticed? Nobody panics when things go
“according to plan.” If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, I tried
to make a rationalist coke-ish COVID vaccine with Amazon
Prime Delivery™, nobody panics, because it’s all “part of the plan”. But
when I say that I made a litsy bitsy Meth lab in my basement, well then
everyone loses their minds.
As someone in a related area of research:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Very normal.
Edit:
Bonus ass-pulled ‘equation’ from a user who talked this out with a friend who got his BS in biology, and some bullshit percentages from another commenter.
The post got featured on the front page (despite LW’s policy to not feature COVID-related content) as ‘the rationality life lessons seemed pretty timeless’.
This is amazing, the dude does not really conceive of a real possibility this all fails:
Yeah, and since it’s only a weak update:
Coolio, mate. Cool cool cool. Literally no way this could be defeated by the evidence.
what the fuck?
You know… You know what I’ve noticed? Nobody panics when things go “according to plan.” If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, I tried to make a rationalist
coke-ishCOVID vaccine with Amazon Prime Delivery™, nobody panics, because it’s all “part of the plan”. But when I say that I made a litsy bitsy Meth lab in my basement, well then everyone loses their minds.As someone in a related area of research: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH