enoch_r

This piece changed how I work with LLMs and made me much more optimistic about how "fun" it can be to work with them: https://nolanlawson.com/2026/05/25/using-ai-to-write-better-...

Before I would just throw prompts at the LLM and it'd end up building a pile of crap (but semi-working crap, and 100x faster than I ever could) - it was pretty depressing. Using tools like `grill-me` (or `grill-with-docs`) I feel like I'm actually building my understanding of the system and helping shape it, and the results are much better.

LLMs are trained to convince a typical human to click the "I like this one better" on their response.

Convincing a human law professor to click the "I would prefer to deliver this response to a student" button, and to not click the "this response is pedagogically harmful" button is a different task!

I could imagine an LLM convincing a typical human to click the "I like this one better" button with flattery, or with nice-sounding platitudes, or with hand-wavey explanations that sound plausible. And in fact that's exactly what LLMs do when they go wrong - they bluff and output superficially plausible nonsense!

But these weren't typical humans, these were law professors specifically tasked with deciding which response was a better option to give to students as a canonical answer to a contract law question. So I think this is a genuinely impressive result.

Sorry for the lack of clarity.

1. some people argue that the implication of this (along with other deaths of science-adjacent people) is that there's a murder campaign against scientists

2. but this "implication" is actually completely innumerate, and in reality the implication is something like "within a large population, you would expect some people to be murdered or commit suicide."

I looked at the whole context of responses to the post before my post, so (1) seemed obvious to me, and I was mostly following on with (2), but I see that it was confusing. :)

Conspiracy theorists don't understand base rates and denominators. They make a list of deaths of people who seem vaguely STEM/"government secret" adjacent and forget to think about what their denominator is. Implicitly, it's "all employees (at all levels) of government labs, plus associate-director-and-up employees at STEM companies, plus all academics working in STEM fields, plus anyone who was formerly in one of these categories."

When you write it out like that, it's obvious that the denominator is ridiculously large and that it would be much more difficult to explain a lack of deaths in such a pool over a ~3 year period.

The missing worker here is typically included in the lists of "suspicious deaths" because she was an administrative assistant at Los Alamos (a government lab).

Exactly what pool of people are we drawing from here? How big is our denominator?

- Anthony Chavez was a foreman supervising construction at Los Alamos. Retired in 2017.

- Melissa Casias (from this article) was an administrative assistant at Los Alamos.

- Steven Garcia was a "property custodian at KCNSC."

- Jason Thomas was associate directory of chemical biology at Novartis (pharma company) on cancer treatment.

- McCasland retired 13 years before he went missing.

- Nuno Loureiro was a plasma physicist at MIT.

So the denominator here has to include:

- current and former employees (at all levels, including clerical positions like Melissa Casias or construction workers like Anthony Chavez) of government research facilities

- management at pharmaceutical companies (or presumably, other STEM companies as well?).

- academics working in STEM fields (MIT plasma physicist Nuno Loureiro)

So you have to ask yourself two questions:

- how big is the pool that we're drawing these deaths from? and

- given a pool of this size, how many people in it would you expect to die in a ~3 year period?

To me the answer is really boring - this number of deaths is just utterly unsurprising. It honestly doesn't even rise to the level of being a "coincidence." It's a complete non-event.

As someone who lives in the US I'd kind of prefer if people didn't flippantly mislead my countrymen to claim that assassinations are beneficial. I found zero sources on Wikipedia for what you claimed. Seriously, if you are too "bothered" to look up any source for an empirical claim, perhaps you should reconsider posting the claim in the first place.

Here are several articles about denial increases in the time immediately following Thompson's death:

- https://www.os-healthcare.com/news-and-blog/denial-rates-are...

- https://www.experian.com/blogs/healthcare/state-of-claims-20...

The claim was not "UHC made prior authorization easier for many procedures," the claim was "rejection rates by health insurance companies plummeted." I found several sources claiming that denial rates increased following the assassination:

- https://www.os-healthcare.com/news-and-blog/denial-rates-are...

- https://www.experian.com/blogs/healthcare/state-of-claims-20...

This doesn't appear to be true at all. Do you have a source?

In this conversation, you have repeatedly referred to "all of the data" and "mountains of data," yet you have posted none. Meanwhile I have posted every major study on both sides of the debate! Your argument seems to be that:

- the experts have told people to use car seats

- experts wisely base policy on "all of the data"

- therefore, "all of the data" must support the claim that car seats save lives

If we're going to discuss the question of whether experts have set policy well or poorly in a particular case, then such a strong prior on "experts always set policy well and based on the best available evidence" kind of assumes the conclusion, doesn't it?

Do you think that car seat mandates (up to age 12 in my state) are good policy if the net effect is:

- a small reduction in minor injuries,

- worse childhoods and parenting experiences (difficult to quantify, but real),

- and a few hundred thousand fewer children being born in the first place,

- very few, if any, lives saved?

If yes, then cool - but I strongly disagree.

If no - then I think the evidence and details very much matter, and that's why I was happy to invest my time in them.

See my comment summarizing the evidence as I understand it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47590700

What articles did you find, exactly? What primary evidence are they basing their claims on? Many of the numbers you'll find with a google search are unclear about what they're comparing to - I believe both of the fatality numbers above (71% and 54%) are relative to completely unrestrained kids, which is not the relevant comparison.

The 45% number I specifically discuss in the other comment, but every independently reproducible study using publicly available data has found much smaller effects, around 10-25% for minor injuries and no statistically significant difference in severe injuries.

To be clear, I'm not saying "don't use car seats," I'm saying that the evidence doesn't support mandating them through age 8 (or 12!).

Our kids would be much safer if we drove everywhere at 15mph - less convenient, but it would prevent many unnecessary deaths. Unfortunately, it is impossible to do anything in the world without risk. So we're forced to balance convenience against safety every day, whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not.

The evidence that car seats save lives is significantly weaker that you probably believe, as I detailed in another comment in this thread. But look: even if car seats make sense for a typical 5 year old on a typical drive in their typical car (which is a higher evidentiary burden than you might think), a mandate imposes a huge logistical tax that makes many normal things completely infeasible or impractical:

- travel with many kids (nope, physically can't carry 4 car seats plus luggage)

- using a taxi, e.g. to go see a movie (nope, can't carry a car seat into the theater)

- carpooling with other families (I'll drive them, you pick up? Nope, we'd have to shuffle car seats around.)

- rides with grandparents or other family members (sorry, we'd have to deliver the car seat to them first)

- splitting kids between two vehicles for errands (let's spend 10m wrestling car seats from one car to the other first)

The whole texture of independent childhood is altered by car seat mandates! Everything gets filtered through "is there a car seat available?". If you haven't experienced this, it's hard to describe - and I think it's absolutely a case where tradeoffs like "how will this affect quality of life?" are completely overridden because "well, if it just saves one life..."

We have 4 kids. Before we had our 3rd, we needed to buy a new vehicle solely because we couldn't fit 3 car seats into the back of our old car. And when traveling with kids, carrying 4 gigantic car seats plus your other luggage is not exactly as easy as you might think! It essentially rules out solo parent travel with all 4 kids. Transferring car seats between two cars, or installing car seats in a taxi, is a serious pain.

Furthermore, the evidence that car seats actually benefit safety is significantly less robust than you might think. The "mountains of evidence" that do exist for things like 70% reductions in fatalities, bizarrely enough, generally compare the rate of fatalities for car seats vs completely unrestrained kids. When you compare the rate of fatalities in car seats to kids wearing adult seat belts, the bulk of the evidence suggests essentially no difference. Fatalities happen when the forces involved are catastrophic and sadly a car seat doesn't help much for kids over 2.

Even a back of the envelope comparison makes this extremely plausible: car crash fatalities for kids 9-12 have declined by 72% from 1978-2017. If car seats and car seat laws save significant numbers of lives, you'd expect that the fatality rate for kids 0-8, who are generally in car seats, to have decreased much more. But it hasn't, it declined by 73% over the same period.

Now, car seats and boosters do seem to moderately reduce non-fatal injuries - huge spread of estimates here, most clustering around 10-25%. It's reasonable for most people to use car seats or boosters most of the time based on this alone, IMO, especially for young kids. But do they justify a mandate? IMO: no. Absolutely not.

Worth mentioning that mandates probably do succeed in one thing: they reduce the number of children born at all by at least 57x more than they prevent child fatalities. Roughly 8,000 kids per year, 145,000 kids since 1980. That's with the (unlikely, as discussed above) assumption that car seats do in fact save significant numbers of lives. But it's also entirely possible that they've prevented hundreds of thousands of kids from being born, somewhat reduced the nonfatal injury rate, and saved essentially no lives.

Citations below:

Fatality reduction with car seats or boosters:

- https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/seatbelts.pdf (found that seat belts as effective as car seats for children 2-6)

- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jae.2449 (independent replication of above with different data set)

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19959729/ (no statistically significant difference between booster seats and seat belt alone for fatalities)

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16754824/ (the main counter-estimate to the above, with the 28% fatality reduction)

Non-fatal injury reductions:

- https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ecinqu/v48y2010i3p521-536.html (no difference in serious injuries, ~25% reduction in least serious injury category)

- https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... (14% reduction in likelihood of injury for boosters)

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19841126/ (45% estimate)

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12783914/ (59% estimate)

Reduction in birth rate from car seat mandates:

- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 (car seat mandates "led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000")

Note that both the 45% and 59% estimate for injury reduction and the 28% estimate for fatality reduction all come from one research group using a proprietary data set. Everything that's independently reproducible points towards small or zero effect on fatalities and modest effects on injuries.

For millenia, about 50% of children died before reaching adulthood.

https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past

We work less than our counterparts 150 years ago:

https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever

Air pollution has decreased over the past few decades (probably much further, just don't have data).

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/emissions-of-air-pollutan...

We're obviously richer, too. Your grandparents had a cozy house - did they have good fresh food all winter when growing up? Could they keep food from going bad in the summer? What about indoor plumbing? These things are so ubiquitous now it's hard to even remember that they aren't just part of the basic fabric of reality.

It's easy to look back with nostalgia (and literal survivor bias - "my ancestors all survived") at the past. But if you actually look at history you will see that "what people have had for millenia" was ... pretty awful. It's an AMAZING time to be alive.

Say I own a spoon company. The government says "hey, I'd like to buy a million spoons from you!" I say "sure, sounds great." We sign a contract stating that I'll give them 1M spoons and they'll send me $1M.

Then the government comes to me and says "hey, actually, turns out we need 500,000 forks and 300,000 knives and only 200,000 spoons."

I say "no, we are a spoon company. Very passionate about spoons. Producing forks and knives would be an entirely different business, and our contract was for spoons."

The military now threatens to destroy my company unless I give them forks and knives instead of spoons.

You say "the voters and congress tell the military how to use utensils, not SpoonCo. Shifting the decision to SpoonCo takes power away from the citizenship."

The military can sign contracts if they wish! They can decline to sign contracts if they wish!

But private citizens can also choose whether to sign or not sign contracts with the military. Threatening to destroy their business if they don't sign contracts the military likes (or to renegotiate existing contracts in the military's favor) is a huge violation.

You seem more interested in debating the imaginary version of me in your head than in having an actual discussion here, so have fun, I think you can do that on your own.

You're proving my point here - the original comment claimed that the left was merely defending the pre-existing, settled rights that trans people have "always" had against the right's aggression, I'm saying that the left has been actively pushing for change and new rights. I think the left sees trans rights as a continuation of the civil rights movement. This is an empirical question, entirely separate from the question of whether this is a good thing.

I would be very interested, thank you. The flag is probably justified since HN is not really the place for these culture war things :) but I'm genuinely trying to understand the perspective here, because it does seem like a big gap between my understanding (the Democratic party has moved left on these issues) and theirs (the Democratic party is just playing defense on these issues).

This article is a great example of motivated reasoning. It's comparing two wildly different numbers: the Ford Pinto number is the total number of deaths that the NHTSA found to have occurred in rear-impact crashes that resulted in a fire. The Cybertruck number is the total number of deaths from all incidents involving fire and a Cybertruck.

According to the Wikipedia article about the Pinto:

> At the time only 1% of automobile crashes would result in fire and only 4% of fatal accidents involved fire, and only 15% of fatal fire crashes are the result of rear-end collisions.

So as a back of the envelope calculation, we'd expect the total number of Pinto fire fatalities to be about 6.5x the fire fatality rate specific to rear-end collisions. Even then, I doubt that statistic would include incidents like the Las Vegas case where the man shot himself in the head while detonating an improvised explosive in his Cybertruck.

This doesn't even get into sample size - the Tesla numbers are based on only 3 incidents and 5 fatalities:

- one, a single-car accident in which 3 people died,

- two, a single-car accident in which 1 person died, and

- three, the driver shot himself in the head

If, say, the first driver hadn't had any passengers and the third driver had not been included in the sample (because it's not a collision), the Cybertruck's rate would be 60% lower. With such a small sample, it's very silly to make confident assertions about the relative risks here.

Finally, both articles are only talking about fire risks, not overall safety record. I would definitely bet that the Cybertruck has a significantly lower fatality rate per mile than a 1975 Pinto purely based on changes in vehicle safety testing and engineering since the 1970s.

This is really, really bad.

The Ford Pinto number is the total number of deaths that the NHTSA found to have occurred between 1970 and mid-1977 (so not the full 9-year period) in rear-impact crashes that resulted in a fire.

This is not comparable to the total number of fatalities involving fire and a Cybertruck (regardless of the impact type, or lack thereof, e.g. the Las Vegas fatality was due to the guy shooting himself in the head). Not a single one of the three Cybertruck incidents would have been included in the Ford Pinto statistic because none of them were rear-impact crashes that resulted in a fire.

According to the Wikipedia article about the Pinto:

> At the time only 1% of automobile crashes would result in fire and only 4% of fatal accidents involved fire, and only 15% of fatal fire crashes are the result of rear-end collisions.

So we'd expect the total fire fatality rate to be about 6.5x the fatality rate specific to rear-end collisions that resulted in fire.

And of course, saying "Teslas are more dangerous than Ford Pintos" is very different than saying "the Tesla Cybertruck has a higher rate of fire fatalities than the Ford Pinto." Even the latter statement would be incorrect but the former is simply absurd.

> It’s funny because the Ford Pinto is thought of as an example of an unreliable death trap but the deaths from Tesla’s poor craftsmanship and design heavily outweigh the Pinto by a wide margin.

What are the stats you're referencing here? I find this difficult to believe, as modern cars are generally much safer than cars from the 1970s and Teslas seem to perform well in crash tests. They'd need to be incredibly dangerous relative to other modern cars to be as dangerous as a typical car from the 1970s.

> I don't know where this delusional that dudes are just hanging brain around women is coming from. You're right, that doesn't happen. That's a conservative's wet dream. I'm sure you, and others, would be beyond ecstatic if transgender people were doing that. Maybe then, you'd have a smidge of justification for all this.

Me: "I want our society to allow businesses to prohibit people with penises from receiving certain services, for example a nude massage at a women-only spa."

You: "This is not happening, it's a conservative's wet dream, maybe if it were happening you'd have a smidge of justification for all this."

If it's not happening, why not allow businesses to prohibit it? Like, if no trans women want to hang out naked with natal women, is it a problem for Wi Spa or Olympus Spa or Archimedes Banya to say "as a nude facility that serves women, we are uncomfortable having phalluses on the premise"? Why are there protests and lawsuits and investigations when people implement these policies?

Do you personally think that those policies are objectionable? Do you think they should be illegal?

> They weren't, and they still aren't. The idea that transwomen want to be around ciswomen and hang brain is a conservative fantasy.

I think you're probably right that the vast majority of trans women are completely uninterested in such a thing. And yet:

In San Francisco activists protested a policy that excluded trans women from a nude bathhouse one night per month for a "phallus free" womens night. They were investigated by the city's Human Rights Commission after numerous reports and reversed course - no more "phallus free" nights. In Washington State a trans activist sued a nude female-only Korean spa for not providing her with service because of her male genitalia.

Are these specific people merely fighting back to try to retain a right that was already "settled" back in 1970? Or are they trying to claim a new right?

I don't claim that there are hundreds of examples of this.

My claim:

- A: today, the left, broadly construed, insists that there is a right for transgender women to go into women-only spaces, including nude spas. For my point, it doesn't matter how often this "right" is exercised - merely that the left asserts that there is such a right.

- B: this was not true of the left 6 years ago (or 45 years ago).

- Consteval's claim that the left is merely defending "settled," uncontroversial rights that trans people have had for decades is therefore wrong.

Evidence for A:

In 2021, a 52 year old sex offender who had been convicted in multiple instances of indecent exposure went into a nude spa. It caused a huge controversy with dueling protests and counterprotests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi_Spa_controversy

In San Francisco, a Russian nude spa announced a policy that 1 night a month would be "ladies only" for people who were assigned that sex at birth, to provide a "phallus-free environment." For that decision, they were investigated by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. They reversed their policy after this intervention.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250307232755/https://www.sfchr...

https://sfstandard.com/2025/03/12/archimedes-banya-ladies-ni...

In Washington, a Korean spa which requires nudity for some services restricted people from male genitalia from entering the facility. A transgender woman with male genitalia was denied service at the facility and sued: https://www.courthousenews.com/after-banning-trans-women-was...

So it seems to me that either:

- transgender women without bottom surgery could go into nude spas in 1970 without issue, or

- I'm wrong about A, and the left doesn't actually insist that trans women have a right to women-only spaces, or

- Consteval is mistaken, and people on the left are in fact pushing for more rights for transgender people that were not settled 6 years ago (or 55 years ago).

I'm asking for some evidence I'm wrong, you're just saying it doesn't really matter if I'm wrong - it's unlikely to affect me personally. Maybe! Nevertheless...

> The reality is that transgender Americans have been doing these things, all these things, for many decades.

Do you have any evidence for that?

For example, do you have evidence of any of these happening in the US before, say, 1990?

- any openly transgender athlete participating in sports on the team of their preferred gender rather than their sex assigned at birth?

- large numbers of children receiving "gender-affirming" hormones or puberty blockers?

- transgender prisoners being housed with the sex they identify as, regardless of whether they actually "present as" that sex?

- a transgender woman being accepted to attend a all-women college?

Maybe all of these happened quietly, so common and uncontroversial that they were totally unremarked upon. But surely there's some evidence that they occurred?

For me it simply doesn't pass the laugh test that a trans woman with a penis could walk into a nude spa in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s without anyone batting an eye.

> Take, for instance, transgender people. Leftist don't care about transgender people outside of the care every person should receive. From their perspective, the subject is a settled matter. However, the right wants to consistently lie about transgender Americans and pass legislation limiting their rights.

> The left, in turn, has no choice but to respond.

> We can tell this is the case because, say, 6 years ago nobody was talking about transgender people. It became a culture war issue when the right chose to bring it into the culture war.

This is interesting, because my perspective is nearly the opposite - that in the past 10 years, it's the left that has decided that trans people need, among other things:

- the right to use the bathroom/changing facilities of their choosing,

- the right to go to sex-segregated spas or gyms of their choosing, and

- the right to play sports on the team of their choosing.

The left has also decided that children should receive "gender-affirming care" if desired, sometimes without parental approval or even notification.

Do you think those things were popular, "settled" positions 6+ years ago, before "the right" chose to bring them into the culture war? Going back a bit further, in 2004, when Obama needed to claim to oppose same-sex marriage for political reasons - you think that at that time, trans women with penises had, say, the "settled" right to go into a women-only nude spa? The only reason we weren't talking about it at the time was because it was so obviously settled, and the right just wanted to stir up trouble by "taking away" that settled right?

To me it seems quite clear that the left, rightly or wrongly, sought to extend new protections, some of which were controversial, to trans people.

Millions did not die of starvation during the Great Depression in the US.

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/12297/how-many-p...

The good faith version of this would be that he is telling the truth, he didn't share or offer to share the photos with anyone, and the rumors the plaintiff heard about people seeing the photos were just rumors. (I think it's clear that at the very least, he mentioned the nude photos to at least one other person - otherwise no rumor could get started in the first place - which is obviously bad behavior, but not nearly as bad as actually sharing the photos.)

Because the sharing of the photos with other people wasn't established by the evidence, the court was just ruling on whether the DA had violated the plaintiffs rights by transferring the data dump from the plaintiff's phone to the sheriff, and whether that violation was obvious/established enough from prior court rulings to revoke QI. It had nothing to do with sharing the photos themselves with anyone (the DA didn't know the data dump had the photos when he shared it).

Do you honestly think, as a principled position, that police officers should be personally liable for enforcing a law which is later decided to be unconstitutional?

For example, if a police officer in 1994 arrested someone for violating the Gun Free School Zones act (struck down as unconstitutional in 1995), should they be personally liable for the damages? Should the judge who decided the case?

Similarly, if a police officer in NYC arrested someone in 2018 for violating the ban on "gravity knives" (struck down as unconstitutional in 2019), should they be personally liable?

If a police officer in Washington, DC arrested someone for violating the city's ban on handguns in 2007 (struck down by the Supreme Court in 2008), should they be personally liable?

Would it be a good thing if police officers and officials refuse to enforce Washington state's ban on "assault weapons", or Oregon's magazine capacity limit, because the "conservative turn" of the Supreme Court means that the law might get struck down as unconstitutional, and then they'd be personally liable for the damages?

I think it's clear that QI sometimes leads to bad outcomes, but honestly, I'm not sure how the system would function without some similar concept.

It's a commitment device - e.g. leave your "mindless scrolling" NFC tag at home so you don't mindlessly scroll while you're out.