Astral Codex Ten

Connor

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Connor

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Connor is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between November 08, 2021 and April 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Cárdenas and Connor received an unsigned letter from the Próspera Foundation”; “Connor is hijacking the prediction market to make a poll”; “Connor said in his interview that he thinks he might have gotten COVID at “the fish market”“. It most often appears alongside America, COVID-19, Georgism.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: November 08, 2021
  • Last seen: April 09, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

21
November 08, 2021 · Original source
The following month, Brimen flew to Roatán. Several civil society groups had issued a statement criticizing Próspera’s treatment of Crawfish Rock, and he wanted the patronato to disavow it on the village’s behalf. But before that could happen, villagers opposed to the ZEDE called for a new vote, one not orchestrated by Próspera. Though only in her 30s, Cárdenas, now a leader of Crawfish Rock’s opposition to Próspera, was elected vice-president, and her friend Luisa Connor became president.
In late October, Cárdenas and Connor received an unsigned letter from the Próspera Foundation, a new name for the charitable organization Monterroso oversees. The foundation had heard that the pair were looking at ways of restoring Crawfish Rock’s old water supply. The letter said that the foundation assumed that meant they no longer wanted to access water from the ZEDE’s well, and was going to cut them off in 30 days’ time.
There was only one way to keep the water flowing, the letter concluded — the patronato had to ask for it “in writing on behalf of the community.” A second letter went out at the same time, this one a notice, from Próspera to villagers across Crawfish Rock, alerting them that they would lose water service in 30 days. Próspera placed the blame squarely on the patronato. “The current leaders do not want the community to have access to Próspera-ZEDE sourced water,” the letter claimed, repeating — in a bolded and underlined passage — the ultimatum Cárdenas and Connor had received. If the patronato made a request in writing, the pipes would remain open.
Mantic Monday: Ukraine Cube Manifold
February 14, 2022 · Original source
Not actually in order This is a semi-randomly selected sample of Manifold markets, but let’s go through them one by one. The Ukraine market is the biggest on Manifold. It’s also deeply out of step with every other prediction market and the top non-prediction-market authorities - who are all giving numbers in the 50s and 60s. I don’t understand how this is so low - yes, play money < real money, but mostly because play money doesn’t get enough people betting. Here lots of people are betting - it’s the biggest market on the site, and since you only start with $1000 either twenty people have bet everything or more people have bet a fraction - but it’s still wrong. I tried to spend some play money to correct it and it snapped back to just as wrong as it was before. I have no explanation. Midnight The Stray Cat is the second biggest market on Manifold, just after Ukraine. I guess the Internet really liking cats shouldn’t be a surprise at this point. In case you need to do research first I’m told this is the cat in question: Props to Manifold for a bunch of markets like the third one on there, where they eat their own dog food by using their market to predict how their business decisions are going to go. ACX Bot has copy-pasted all of my predictions from 2022. At some point they should be able to compare their results with Zvi (ie a single very smart person), with the contest many of you entered (ie an average of formless crowdsourced predictions), and Metaculus (ie a non-monetary forecasting tournament). I’m looking forward to it! Most of you already know Lars Doucet, who’s written some great ACX posts on Georgism. I don’t know what possessed him to make a Joe Rogan Georgism interviewee market, unless he’s gunning for the position. Valinor is a group house on my street, with ~a dozen people living in and around it. We’ve been talking about fixing the backyard for a while. Now we can bet about whether it will happen. Having a number for this actually affects some of my decisions a little. Connor is hijacking the prediction market to make a poll, which is pretty cute. Dwayne Johnson does not have a 15% chance of winning the election. Manifold is suffering from the usual play money problem, where if you only start out with $1000 in play money, nobody wants to lock it up for three years to make a 15% profit. Vivek’s market, “Will I believe that 13177 is a prime number”, is pretty unusual. I’m interpreting it as a test/demonstration of prediction markets’ information-gathering ability. If you don’t know something and it’s hard to Google, you can make a prediction market about whether you’ll believe it in the future, and people who are able to figure out the answer will bet on it. Based on the 97% YES rate, I’m guessing 13177 is in fact a prime number. What else can you do this with? TANSTAAFL’s “Will I Be Convinced That Justin Trudeau Is Not Fidel Castro’s Son?” market is maybe pushing the limit of this methodology. Anyway, there are lots of me-too prediction markets but this is something genuinely new under the sun. Maybe it will be awesome itself, but I’m also hoping it helps bigger players realize how much more is possible. This Week In Metaculus A few new questions on intelligence enhancement, eg: The question explicitly allows embryo selection, but says it must raise IQ ten points and be available for <25% median income to count. Trivial improvements to existing embryo selection will top out around 9 points, so this seems to be predicting something more interesting, maybe iterated embryo selection at the very least. I’m probably slightly bearish on this one; I believe if it existed someone would find a way to get it, but I think the regulatory climate might be able to prevent the relevant research indefinitely. Improving adult IQ is really hard. This is a bold thing to speculate about! Atmospheric CO2 was 300ish for most of pre-industrial history, 400ish now, and rising. This question predicts 600 in 2100, which sounds like what happens if global warming gets a bit worse but eventually stabilizes. I’m less sure. I think if we make it to 2100, we’ll have so much technology that atmospheric CO2 can be whatever we want it to be. But maybe we’ll want it to stay where it is; once there’s been a lot of global warming and people have moved / shifted lifestyles, it could be equally disruptive to cool the planet back down. Right now it’s 5%, the official government prediction is 10% by 2030, but this market says 17.6%. But look at that probability distribution! It’s a lot of people saying 10%ish, plus a very long tail of very big numbers. I think people are disagreeing about how exponential this change is going to be. Shorts Metaculus is holding an essay contest for people who want to use their AI-related prediction markets to argue the future of AI. $6500 available in prizes.
Inline links: predictions from 2022, ACX posts on Georgism, Will I Be Convinced That Justin Trudeau Is Not Fidel Castro’s Son?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!V2bV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca419ec2-7b91-44cd-80b0-2aad1baa4c2f_766x166.png, The question, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ah6n!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1ff4f28d-1901-45f2-85bc-8f1c2120ecd1_770x187.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zSK8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F80e3383c-6f68-412a-ac90-ca63236bdb10_769x167.png, This, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!frCz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F976d1b66-daee-43d1-948a-500e77ac5a2f_764x164.png, this market, holding an essay contest
Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate
April 09, 2024 · Original source
1: Comments Arguing Against Zoonosis — 1.1: Is COVID different from other zoonoses? — 1.2: Were the raccoon-dogs wild-caught? — 1.3: 92 early cases — 1.4: COVID in Brazilian wastewater — 1.5 Biorealism’s 16 arguments — 1.6: DrJayChou’s 7 arguments — 1.7: How much should coverup worry us? — 1.8: Have Worobey and Pekar been debunked? — 1.9: Was there ascertainment bias in early cases — 1.10: Connor Reed / Gwern on cats — 1.11: Rootclaim’s response to my post
“The first known case predates the market outbreak by a month” - this is not the consensus position. I cannot say for sure what Dr. Chou means by this, but I suspect he’s referring to one of the many claims to this effect that Peter effectively debunked during the debate (Connor Reed, Mr. Chen, the 92 cases, Brazil, etc).
Before going further, I recommend reading page 8 of the supplementary text of Worobey’s paper, titled “Robustness Of Statistical Test Results To Ascertainment Bias”, or pages 14-17, “Additional Data Related To Case Ascertainment Biases”, which explain all the reasons he thinks this isn’t true. I promise you aren’t the first person to think that maybe Worobey could be contaminated by ascertainment bias. If that still doesn’t help, Worobey talks more about his strategy for avoiding ascertainment bias here. Most important, he counted only cases from December; the market connection was discovered December 30 and added to diagnostic criteria January 3. This doesn’t mean bias is impossible - some of these points are people who caught COVID on December 31, but only got diagnosed January 4 after the new diagnostic criteria were added. But most cases are pre-criteria. And Worobey looked at various subsets of pre-criteria cases and found they were all at least as market-focused as the overall set. For example, he looked at the earliest COVID records in one Wuhan hospital system: 10 of these hospitals’ 19 earliest COVID-19 cases were linked to Huanan Market (∼53%), comparable both to Jinyintan’s 66% (of 41 cases) (4) and to the WHO-China report’s 33% of 168 retrospectively identified cases within Wuhan across December 2019 (1). Regarding cases at the Wuhan Central Hospital and HPHICWM, patients with a history of exposure at Huanan Market could not have been “cherry picked” before anyone had identified the market as an epidemiologic risk factor. Hence, there was a genuine preponderance of early COVID-19 cases associated with Huanan Market. Likewise, a study conducted January 2 (so not impacted at all by the January 3 criteria) found that 27 of 41 known patients had market links. Likewise, the first five cases were all detected in the market, and it doesn’t even make sense to talk about ascertainment bias for these. What is the Weissman paper that observeralt is talking about? It argues: if the pandemic started at the market, each seemingly non-market-linked case must ultimately derive from a market-linked case. Therefore, we should expect non-market-linked cases to require more steps than market-linked cases. Therefore, they should be further away. But if we look at the map above, we see that not-market-linked cases are closer to the market than market-linked cases. So something must be wrong, and that something might be ascertainment bias. (at least this is my interpretation of Weissman’s argument, which is more mathematical; read the paper to make sure I’m getting it right). This is a weirdly spherical-cow view of an epidemic, worthy of a physicist. It’s easy to think of reasons the linked-cases-should-be-closer rule might not hold. For example, suppose that on their lunch break, market vendors go have lunch at restaurants surrounding the market. They infect people in these restaurants, who then infect their friends and family. But these people never went to the market themselves. Now there are a bunch of non-market-linked cases immediately surrounding the wet market. But also - of all markets in Wuhan, Huanan sold the most weird wildlife. Suppose someone in the boonies gets a craving for raccoon-dog one day, their local convenience store doesn’t have it, so they hop on a bus and go downtown to the city’s main wet market. Then they get infected with COVID. Now there’s a wet-market-linked case in the boonies. In other words, we should expect two modes of spread: general geographic diffusion from the epicenter, and people from far away who made specific trips. If this still doesn’t seem obvious to you, consider - usually when COVID first arrived in America or Brazil or wherever, they were able to trace it back to a specific person from Wuhan who visited the country. If I was the first person in America to get COVID, I could usually say “Oh, it must have been my business meeting with Mr. Chin from Wuhan”. At the same time, if someone from the next town over from Wuhan got COVID, they probably couldn’t trace it back to a specific Wuhanite - everyone from Wuhan is coming and going so often that my town is just full of COVID in general. So I don’t think Weissman’s paper proves anything, and I think the general pattern of blue and orange dots suggests ascertainment bias wasn’t playing a role. So why does George Gao say that there was ascertainment bias? I looked for the direct source of the Gao quote and couldn’t find it; if someone else is able to, please let me know, since I’d be interested in exactly what he thinks about this. 1.10: Connor Reed / Gwern on cats Gwern wrote: Yes, I don't understand this (paraphrased) claim by Peter: > He also told the Mail that his cat got the coronavirus too, which is impossible. 'Impossible', thus implying the man was lying? I was under the impression that, quite aside from cats having tons of coronaviruses in general (FCoV being a particularly serious threat to young cats, which also seems to be a remarkable case study of the harms of the FDA), that it was not just not 'impossible' for domestic pet cats to get the coronavirus too, it was routine for them to get COVID-19, and even other cat species in *zoos* have tested positive and this was true very early in the COVID-19 pandemic and quite well publicized and well known (eg April 2020 https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/tiger-coronavirus-covid19-positive-test-bronx-zoo ). This was a topic of interest to me at the time because I like cats and have a cat and was wondering what the implications of me being inevitably infected might be for my cat, and so I remember this quite well despite my general attempt to remain ignorant of as many COVID-19 matters as possible... And double-checking now to see if all of these reports were somehow false positives or faked, I continue to see everyone like the CDC stating that it is still totally possible and routine for cats in close contact with infected humans (you know, like a *pet* cat) to be infected with COVID-19: https://www.cdc.gov/healthypets/covid-19/pets.html Given that Peter has supposedly spent years autistically researching every last detail and this detail in particular in order to discredit that British dude, I'm experiencing sudden Gell-Man Amnesia here about the rest of his claims, as well as the supposed experts evaluating Peter's claims if they didn't flag that (I have not checked). This is in the context of Connor Reed, a British man who claimed to have gotten COVID on November 25 - which, if true, would be surprisingly (though not impossibly) early according to the zoonosis narrative. Peter argued his story didn’t hold up, and one of his points centered around his claim that his cat might have caught COVID from him and died. Unfortunately, I mis-quoted Peter. I said Peter argued it was impossible for his cat to get COVID-19 (false). His actual statement was that it’s extremely rare for a cat to die of COVID-19. Peter, Gwern, and I then proceeded to get very confused about the exact claims and timeline, which I think is because Connor said totally different things in different interviews: In an interview with Wales Online on 2/4/2020, he said that "my kitten caught the feline coronavirus and developed pneumonia and died, but I don't think I caught it from her. I think that was just coincidence.”
Inline links: here, 4, 1, a study, the Weissman paper, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/tiger-coronavirus-covid19-positive-test-bronx-zoo, https://www.cdc.gov/healthypets/covid-19/pets.html, an interview with Wales Online