Astral Codex Ten

The Pyramid And The Garden

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The Pyramid And The Garden

Article

The Pyramid And The Garden is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between January 13, 2023 and March 28, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Consider the pseudohistory claims I discuss in The Pyramid And The Garden”; “arguments like the one I use in The Pyramid And The Garden”; “Here I remember The Pyramid And The Garden : you can get very strong coincidences”. It most often appears alongside ACX comment thread, ACX subreddit, ancient-aliens theory.

Metadata

  • Category: Publications
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: January 13, 2023
  • Last seen: March 28, 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.

Conspiracies of Cognition, Conspiracies Of Emotion
January 13, 2023 · Original source
Consider the pseudohistory claims I discuss in The Pyramid And The Garden. The Great Pyramid’s latitude in standard notation equals, to within seven decimal places, the speed of light in tens of millions of meters per second. In a strict sense, this is a one-in-a-million chance, although the post tries to explain why this might be less impressive than it sounds.
Inline links: The Pyramid And The Garden
Contra Kavanagh On Fideism
February 14, 2023 · Original source
A picture my instructor took of me at one of the ruins. Nobody was under any obligation to handhold me out of my Atlantis beliefs. But the #1 Google rank for “site about how Atlantis isn’t real” is a scarce resource. Article space on skeptic blogs (podcasts were still years into the dystopian future at this point) was a scarce resource. And when people frittered these scarce resources away on a thousand identical pieces saying “lol you’re stupid and racist if you believe this, haven’t you heard that conspiracies are always wrong?” - and never on any explanation of the GIANT UNDERWATER PYRAMIDS - yes, I feel like I was wronged. Eventually I lifted myself up by my own bootstraps. I studied some of the relevant history myself (less impressive than it sounds, Wikipedia was just coming into existence around this time). I learned enough about geology to understand on a gut level how natural processes can sometimes produce rocks that are really really artificial-looking - yes, even as artificial-looking as the ones in the picture above. More important, I learned something like rationality. I learned how to make arguments like the one I use in The Pyramid And The Garden. I realized that, for all their skill at finding anomalies, the Atlantis books couldn’t agree on a coherent narrative of their own. Some placed Atlantis in the Atlantic, others in the Pacific, others in Antarctica; some used it to explain artifacts from long after others said that it fell. For a while if I squinted I could sort of kind of smush them into a single story, but that story had even more anomalies than normal historians’. Eventually I gave up and joined the mainstream. I’m not angry at Graham Hancock. I see no evidence he has ever been anything but a weird, well-meaning guy who likes pyramids a little too much. But I feel a burning anger against anti-conspiracy bloggers, anti-conspiracy podcasters, and everyone else who wrote “lol imagine how stupid you would have to be to believe in Atlantis” style articles. Either these people didn’t understand the arguments for and against Atlantis, or they did. If they didn’t, they were frauds, claiming expertise in a subject they knew nothing about. If they did, then at any moment they could have saved me from a five year wild-goose-chase - but chose not to, because it was more fun to insult me. II. Kavanagh makes fun of me for writing 25,000 words on ivermectin. I agree this might not have been the best use of my time, and I would accept this criticism from anyone except Kavanagh - who’s devoted his whole career to thinking about ivermectin and ideas closely aligned to it. There’s a Hindu legend (maybe apocryphal?) about an atheist philosopher who spends literally every second of every day denouncing God. When he dies, God welcomes him into the highest heaven, praising him as a great yogi - for he never let his consciousness stray from awareness of God even for one moment. If by some inexplicable theological anomaly Bret Weinstein turns out to be God, Chris Kavanagh is definitely going to the highest heaven. So Kavanagh’s complaint can’t be that I’m thinking about this question at all. He sort of hints at a complaint where it took me too long to figure out that ivermectin didn’t work - shouldn’t I have been able to do it without the long review? But I clearly said on my first post on the subject that I had long since decided it to my own satisfaction, and was just trying to clear up some of my remaining questions. What is his complaint? At the risk of putting words in his mouth, two parts of his comment stand out to me as having important arguments: I interpret this as - to even try to “evaluate the evidence” at all is a mistake, because it suggests there might be evidence on both sides. Instead, you should admit that some people are idiots who believe things there’s no evidence for, and move on. But the problem with “if studies had supported ivermectin as an effective treatment, it would have been adopted”, is that about thirty different studies did support it, and it was adopted in several countries, mostly in Latin America. The first few meta-analyses of ivermectin found that it worked! I’m not defending ivermectin here. I think there was a reasonable explanation of this: a combination of fraud, poor methodology, publication bias, and maybe Strongyloides infections. But until someone tells you the reasonable explanation, there’s no reasonable explanation! It’s like the giant underwater pyramids. If I go diving and see the giant underwater pyramids, and you just say “LOL, you are stupid, don’t you know conspiracy theories aren’t real?”, you’re not going to convince me! I wanted to give the reasonable explanation, in terms that people could understand. Before doing any research, I had some intuitive guesses about what the reasonable explanation would look like - something something methodological problems something something small studies. But this, itself, isn’t a reasonable explanation. It’s an IOU for a reasonable explanation. I agree that many people are unreasonable and don’t respond to reasonable explanations. I think sometimes this is genetic or something and can’t be helped, but other times it comes after a hundred different experiences where you want reasonable explanations and don’t get them and also people are jerks to you and you learn that the establishment can’t be trusted. Mahabharata: “Even after ten thousand explanations, the fool is no wiser, but the wise man requires only two thousand five hundred.” If I had had to suffer through a few more skeptics calling me racist because I wanted to know why there were giant underwater pyramids, I probably would have believed in Atlantis even harder, out of spite, and never talked myself out of it. And then when ivermectin came along, I would have thought “Scientists? Experts? They’re the guys who are so dumb they can’t even figure out Atlantis existed when there are giant underwater pyramids right in front of their eyes. Screw them, I’m listening to Bret Weinstein.” I side with the Christians. There may be people so far gone into the outer darkness that they can’t be saved, but you are forbidden from ever believing with certainty that any specific individual is in this category. Act as if everyone is one good deed away from falling to their knees and acknowledging the light of Jesus. Moving on: @RachelBCam Imagine Scott’s blog with some more generous degrees of freedom exercised in his analysis, suddenly you have a more positive result & the impression the issue is a genuine controversy. Indeed, this is what people like Alexandros did in response.","username":"C_Kavanagh","name":"Chris Kavanagh","profile_image_url":"","date":"Tue Feb 14 15:50:05 +0000 2023","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":0,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> This is the part I have the most trouble interpreting charitably. I can’t stop reading it as “doing good science is a near occasion of sin for doing bad science”. It sounds kind of like fideism, the belief (more common in atheists’ imaginations than real religion) that somebody who reasons their way to belief in God is a sinner, because a real saint would have believed through blind faith, without having to reason. The best I can do is to think of this as a PR argument: it looks bad to be treating these kinds of questions as live issues. I generally don’t like PR arguments, but while we’re having them: doesn’t it kind of look bad for one side to be promoting fideism? The ivermectinist slogan is “do your own research”. Kavanagh’s apparent slogan is “don’t do research” - even if you get it right, having tried it at all makes you impure. If there’s some argument I know nothing about - pro- vs. anti- skub, perhaps - and all I’ve heard is that the pro-skub people say that you should look at evidence and decide rationally based on your best judgment, and the anti-skub people say you should never look at evidence and have to trust them - I’m already 90-something percent sure pro-skub are the good guys. My model of the PR here - of the overall milieu and psychological factors that turn people into conspiracists - is that they spot some giant underwater pyramids, compelling-seeming facts that appear to point toward conspiracy. These facts have alternative explanations, but these alternatives are less compelling and harder to explain. Realistically some people are going to get caught up in the conspiracy’s superior first-level compellingness and you can’t help them. But other people are on the fence and can be talked down. This is the job of the pro-mainstream-anti-conspiracy people. Instead of doing their job, these people: ignore them
Inline links: The Pyramid And The Garden, so far gone into the outer darkness that they can’t be saved, pro- vs. anti- skub
Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate
March 28, 2024 · Original source
Okay, this one is just awful. It takes the risky gambit above - giving extreme odds to something - then doubles down on it by multiplying across twenty different stages to get a stupendously low probability of 1/5*10^25. If we believe this, it’s more likely that we win the lottery three times in a row than that we learn lab leak was true after all. Eliezer Yudkowsky calls this the Multiple Stage Fallacy. Even aside from the failure mode in the sunrise example above (where people are too reluctant to give strong probabilities), it fails because people don’t think enough about the correlations between stages. For example, maybe there’s only 1/10 odds that the Wuhan scientists would choose the suboptimal RRAR furin cleavage site. And maybe there’s only 1/20 odds that they would add a proline in front to make it PRRAR. But are these really two separate forms of weirdness, such that we can multiply them together and get 1/200? Or are scientists who do one weird thing with a furin cleavage site more likely to do another? Mightn’t they be pursuing some general strategy of testing weird furin cleavage sites? (For example, Yuri proposed that, because the scientists wanted to understand how pandemic coronaviruses originate in nature, they might deliberately pick more natural-looking features over more designed-looking ones, which would neatly explain many features seemingly inconsistent with lab leak. Is this a conspiracy theory? Rootclaim is able to successfully route around this question. If the probability of a feature happening in nature is X, then the probability of it happening in this variant of lab leak scenario is X * [chance that the scientists wanted to imitate nature). This gives it a (deserved) complexity penalty without ruling out this (non-zero and potentially important) possibility.) In any case, Peter didn’t care as much about probabilistic analysis as Saar, he didn’t make his case hinge on this slide, and he might have been kind of using it to troll Rootclaim (which definitely worked). He might not have been making any of the mistakes above. But anyone who took this slide seriously would end up dramatically miscalibrated. The Math: Big Pictures Another of Saar’s concerns with the verdict was that Peter was an extraordinary debater, to the point where it could have overwhelmed the signal from the evidence. It’s hard to watch the videos and not come away impressed. Peter seems to have a photographic memory for every detail of every study he’s ever read. He has some kind of 3D model in his brain of Wuhan, the wet market, and how all of its ventilation ducts and drains interacted with each other. Whenever someone challenged one of his points, he had a ten-slide PowerPoint presentation already made up to address that particular challenge, and would go over it with complete fluency, like he was reciting a memorized speech. I sometimes get accused of overdoing things, but I can’t imagine how many mutations it would take to make me even a fraction as competent as Peter was. Saar’s closing argument included the admission: Peter, I think everyone can agree, has much more knowledge on [COVID] origins than we do. He's invested much more time. He may be a much more talented researcher. He's much more into the details. He probably knows the best in the world on origins at this point. Once you’ve described your opponent that way in your closing argument, what’s left of your case? Saar thought a lot was left. Throughout the debate, he tried to make a point about how getting the inference right was more important than winning sub-sub-sub-debates about individual lines of evidence. Although Peter won most specific points of contention, Saar thought that if the judges could just keep their mind on the big picture, they would realize a lab leak was more likely. I’m potentially sympathetic to arguments like Saar’s. Imagine a debate about UFOs. Imaginary-Saar says “UFOs can’t be real, because it doesn’t make sense for aliens to come to Earth, circle around a few fields in Kansas, then leave without providing any other evidence of their existence.” Imaginary-Peter says “John Smith of Topeka saw a UFO at 4:52 PM on 6/12/2010, and everyone agrees he’s an honorable person who wouldn’t lie, so what’s your explanation of that?” Saar says “I don’t know, maybe he was drunk or something?” Peter says “Ha, I’ve hacked his cell phone records and geolocated him to coordinates XYZ, which is a mosque. My analysis finds that he’s there on 99.5% of Islamic holy days, which proves he’s a very religious Muslim. And religious Muslims don’t drink! Your argument is invalid!” On the one hand, imaginary-Peter is very impressive and sure did shoot down Saar’s point. On the other, imaginary-Saar never really claimed to have a great explanation for this particular UFO sighting, and his argument doesn’t depend on it. Instead of debating whether Smith could or couldn’t have been drunk, we need to zoom out and realize that the aliens explanation makes no sense. The problem was, Saar couldn’t effectively communicate what his big picture was. Neither deployed some kind of amazingly elegant prior. They both used the same kind of evidence. The only difference was that Peter’s evidence hung together, and Saar’s evidence fell apart on cross-examination. I think - not because Saar really explained it, but just reading between the lines - Saar thought the un-ignorable big picture evidence was the origin in a city with a coronavirus gain-of-function lab, and the twelve-nucleotide insertion in the furin cleavage site. To some degree, Peter just ate the loss on those questions. No matter how you slice it, it really is a weird coincidence that the epidemic started so close to Asia’s biggest coronavirus laboratory. Peter tried to deflect this - he pointed out there were other BSL-3 and BSL-4 laboratories in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, etc. But this was a rare question where he unambiguously came out looking worse - the other cities’ labs had much less coronavirus-specific research. Wuhan really was unique (aside from the other big coronavirus lab in North Carolina). Peter did better when he tried to control the damage: there are a couple hundred million people in the South Asian areas where people eat weird animals exposed to virus-infected bats, Wuhan has a population of about 12 million, so maybe 1.5% of all potential zoonotic pandemics should start in Wuhan. Peter tried to argue that Wuhan was a local trade center, so maybe we should up that to 5 - 10%. 5 - 10% coincidences aren’t that rare. Even 1.5% coincidences happen sometimes. Likewise, the furin cleavage site really does stand on a genetic map. I didn’t feel like either side did much math to quantify how weird it was. Naively, I might think of this as “30,000 bases in COVID, only one insertion, it’s in what’s obviously the most interesting place - sounds like 30,000-to-one odds against”. Against that, a virus with a boring insertion would never have become a pandemic, so maybe you need to multiply this by however much viral evolution is going on in weird caves in Laos, and then you would get the odds that at least one virus would have an insertion interesting enough to go global. Neither participant calculated this in a way that satisfied me (though see here for related discussion). Instead, Peter tried to undermine the furin argument by showing that, as surprising as the site was under a natural origin, it would be an even more surprising choice for human engineers. Saar argued it wasn’t - but because of his policy of giving adjusted-for-model-error odds, he only gave this a factor of 30 in his analysis. Since Peter gave it a higher factor of 50 in his analysis, it looked from the outside like Saar had already conceded this point, and the judges were mostly happy to go with Saar’s artificially-low estimate. The Math: Double Coincidences Saar brought up an interesting point halfway through the debate: you should rarely see high Bayes factors on both sides of an argument. That is, suppose you accept that there’s only a 1-in-10,000 chance that the pandemic starts at a wet market under lab leak. And suppose you accept there’s only a 1-in-10,000 chance that COVID’s furin cleavage site could evolve naturally. If lab leak is true, then you might find 1-in-10,000 evidence for lab leak. But it’s a freak coincidence that there was 1-in-10,000 evidence for zoonosis5. Likewise, if zoonosis is true, you might find 1-in-10,000 evidence for this true thing. But it’s a freak coincidence that there was 1-in-10,000 evidence for lab leak. Either way, you’re accepting that a 1-in-10,000 freak coincidence happened. Isn’t it more likely you’ve bungled your analysis? I was following along at home, and I definitely bungled this point; I had some high Bayes factors on both sides. I adjusted some of them downward based on Saar’s good point, but how far should we take it? Here I remember The Pyramid And The Garden: you can get very strong coincidences if you have many degrees of freedom, ie buy a lot of lottery tickets. So for example, suppose there are fifty things about a virus. You should expect at least one of those to have a one-in-fifty coincidence by pure chance. What about more than that? You might be able to get away with this by saying there are an infinite number of possible conspiracy theories, and some from that infinite set are brought into existence when a strong enough coincidence makes them plausible. For example, it’s really weird that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. If I wanted, I could form a conspiracy theory about a group of weird assassins obsessed with killing Founding Fathers on important dates, and then Jefferson and Adams’ deaths would be 1/10,000 evidence for that theory. But this is the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, which Saar warned against several times. I don’t know if “the virus started in Wuhan, which is where they’re doing this research” gets a Texas Sharpshooter penalty, or how high that penalty should be. But the furin cleavage site doesn’t - people were talking about lab leak before anyone noticed it. The Aftermath: Peter Peter seemed satisfied with the result, in an understated sort of way: It seemed like an interesting experiment in monetizing the debunking of a conspiracy theory. I think there's usually a big asymmetry where it's easy to get rich spreading bullshit (like, the top anti-vaxxers during the pandemic all made a million dollars a year on substack), but it's almost impossible to make money on debunking it. The Rootclaim challenge seemed like one rare case where the opposite was true. Beyond that, I don't know what it's good for. It does seem like there could be a positive social impact from more people understanding that the lab leak hypothesis is (almost certainly) false. The Aftermath: Saar Saar says the debate didn’t change his mind. In fact, by the end of the debate, Rootclaim released an updated analysis that placed an even higher probability on lab leak than when they started. In his blog post, he discussed the issues above, and said the judges had erred in not considering them. He respects the judges, he appreciates their efforts, he just thinks they got it wrong. Although he respected their decision, he wanted the judges to correct what he saw as mistakes in their published statements, which delayed the public verdict and which which Viewers Like You did not appreciate: I ran an early draft of this post by him. There was some miscommunication about the exact publication date, so he hasn’t had time to write up a full response, but he has some quick thoughts (and I’ll link the full response when he writes it). He says: We will provide a full response to this post soon, but the main problem with it is fairly simple: There is general agreement that the main evidence for zoonosis is HSM (Huanan Seafood Market) forming an early cluster of cases. The contention is whether it is amazing 10,000x evidence, or is it negligible. All other evidence points to a lab leak, and if HSM is shown to be weak, lab leak is a clear winner. We provided an analysis of why it is negligible that is as close to mathematical proof as such things can be. Read it here. Scott and I exchanged a few emails on this issue and Scott preferred to discuss more intuitive analyses of HSM, using rules of thumb that likely served him well in the past. While I believe I managed to mostly explain where these failed, and Scott understands HSM is far weaker evidence than he initially thought6, he still has a very strong intuitive feeling (based on years of dealing with probabilities) that this is some exceptional coincidence, and that prevents him from properly updating his posterior. At the end of the day, this cannot be settled without going through our semi-formal derivation, understanding it, and either identifying the problem with it or accepting it (and thereby accepting lab-leak to be more likely). Here is a quick summary of the mistakes made by those claiming HSM is strong evidence: The first mistake is conflating Bayes factors with conditional probabilities. 1/10000 is the supposed conditional probability p(HSM|Lab Leak), That should be divided by the conditional probability of HSM under Zoonosis. Markets were not identified as a high-risk location prior to this outbreak (This will be elaborated in the full response), and in SARS1 the spillovers were mostly at restaurants and other food handlers that deal more closely with wildlife. While it's cool to point to the raccoon dog photo, that was a result of a retrospective search (we don't know what other photos they took which in retrospect would be brought up as premonition). Unbiased data shows markets are not a likely spillover location for zoonosis. We originally estimated p(HSM|Zoonosis)<0.1. Following more research we did to answer Scott's questions, this is more likely <0.03.
Inline links: Multiple Stage Fallacy, see here, 5, The Pyramid And The Garden, Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, blog post, 6