Yudkowsky said that all the sources he could find in November 2020 said that scaling up Pfizer vaccine production to more than 1e8 doses takes months.
Resolved true The record shows it happened or was so.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
What would count as true or false
Judge the sources available in or before November 2020. True: the public sources of the time, such as Pfizer and BioNTech statements, news reports and analyses, consistently indicated that producing more than 100 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine would take months. For example, Pfizer projected up to 50 million doses in 2020 and 1.3 billion in 2021. Mostly true: most sources indicated this, with minor exceptions or ambiguity. Mixed: the sources were split. Mostly false: notable sources of the time suggested that 100 million doses could be reached in weeks, so the claim overstates. False: the sources of the time generally indicated that scale-up beyond 100 million doses would take much less than a month.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (3)
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E1 Pfizer, BioNTech say Covid vaccine is more than 90% effective CNBC · 9 November 2020
“Based on current projections, Pfizer and BioNTech expect to produce up to 50 million vaccine doses in 2020, and up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021.”
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E2 Pfizer and BioNTech Announce an Agreement with U.S. Government for up to 600 Million Doses of mRNA-based Vaccine Candidate Against SARS-CoV-2 Pfizer Inc. / BioNTech SE (press release via Business Wire) · 22 July 2020
“The companies currently expect to manufacture globally up to 100 million doses by the end of 2020 and potentially more than 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021, subject to final dose selection from their clinical trial.”
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E3 Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine: Here's what experts are saying about the new data - National | Globalnews.ca Global News · 9 November 2020
“Based on current projections we expect to produce globally up to 50 million vaccine doses in 2020 and up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021,”
Reasoning
In July 2020, Pfizer and BioNTech said they expected to make up to 100 million doses by the end of 2020 (E2). In November 2020, news reports said the projection had dropped to up to 50 million doses in 2020, with up to 1.3 billion in 2021 (E1, E3). All of these sources point to production above 100 million doses taking months, not weeks. This matches the example the resolution criteria give for a true verdict.
Cite this claim
Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Yudkowsky said that all the sources he could find in November 2020 said that scaling up Pfizer vaccine production to more than 1e8 doses takes months.” (said 14 November 2020). Verdict: resolved true. Reliability API, claim c_6b9dc540bff0, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_6b9dc540bff0
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
More factual claims by Eliezer Yudkowsky
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Mostly false
“We know observationally that something about social media is fucking people up quite a lot, kids even more so than adults; that could be one contributing factor among others.”
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Resolved true
“Some social media company finally went and added easy phone calls to Congress.”
A social media company added a feature allowing easy phone calls to Congress.
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Mixed
“I was observing that obvious-seeming hypothesis myself, sometime around the time of GPT 3.5.”
Yudkowsky himself observed the persona-selection-like hypothesis around the time of GPT 3.5.
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Mostly true
“The test-passing preference stands on its own once formed.”
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Mostly true
“LLMs surely have neural circuits they learned to model text streams from fictional and nonfictional personas that are not lying, deceiving, cheating.”
Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.