Original title ‘What we talk about when we talk about risk’. article explains medical risk and why the polygenic embryo selection people think about it the wrong way. Includes a mention of one of our Scotts (you know the one). Non archived link: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about
Possibly my favorite kind of article. “The numbers that get thrown about don’t mean what the people throwing them around think them to mean, here is what they actually mean”. It’s like someone telling you about the defcon numbers and that smaller is more serious, or that if they say 50% chance of rain, they don’t mean it is a coin flip on it raining, they mean that in 50% of the area they are talking about, it will definitely rain. Except this one is: “numbers used in polygenic embryo selection aren’t like base stats in a videogame menu, you turds”
That describes a common rationalist failure mode. They reach for a false sense of quantification by throwing lots of numbers at things, but the numbers are already approximations of much more nuanced, complex, and/or continuous things, so by overemphasizing the numbers, they actually get further from properly understanding. See for example… fixation on IQ; slapping probabilities everywhere; extrapolating trend lines (METR task length); and prediction markets.