I haven’t thought much about nuclear policy, so I can’t respond there. But at least in alignment, I expect that pushing on variables where there’s less than a 2x difference between the expected positive and negative effects of changing that variable is not a good use of time for altruistically-motivated people.
(By contrast, upweighting or downweighting Eliezer’s opinions by a factor of 2 could lead to significant shifts in expected value, especially for people who are highly deferential. The specific thing I think doesn’t make much difference is deferring to a version of Eliezer who’s 90% confident about something, versus deferring to the same extent to a version of Eliezer who’s 45% confident in the same thing.)
My more general point, which doesn’t hinge on the specific 2x claim, is that naive conversions between metrics of calibration and deferential weightings are a bad idea, and that a good way to avoid naive conversions is to care a lot more about innovative thinking than calibration when deferring.
I haven’t thought much about nuclear policy, so I can’t respond there. But at least in alignment, I expect that pushing on variables where there’s less than a 2x difference between the expected positive and negative effects of changing that variable is not a good use of time for altruistically-motivated people.
(By contrast, upweighting or downweighting Eliezer’s opinions by a factor of 2 could lead to significant shifts in expected value, especially for people who are highly deferential. The specific thing I think doesn’t make much difference is deferring to a version of Eliezer who’s 90% confident about something, versus deferring to the same extent to a version of Eliezer who’s 45% confident in the same thing.)
My more general point, which doesn’t hinge on the specific 2x claim, is that naive conversions between metrics of calibration and deferential weightings are a bad idea, and that a good way to avoid naive conversions is to care a lot more about innovative thinking than calibration when deferring.