and ask them if they are trying to get loans in order to increase their donations to projects decreasing AI risk, which makes sense if they do not expect to pay the interest in full due to high risk of extinction.
Fraud is bad.
In any case, people already don’t have enough worthwhile targets for donating money to, even under short timelines, so it’s not clear what good taking out loans would do. If it’s a question of putting one’s money where one’s mouth is, I personally took a 6-figure paycut in 2022 to work on reducing AI x-risk, and also increased my consumption/spending.
That’s not fraud, without more—Vasco didn’t suggest that anyone obtain loans that they did not intend to repay, or could not repay, in a no-doom world.
Every contract has an implied term that future obligations are void in the event of human extinction. There’s no shame in not paying one’s debts because extinction happened.
You cannot spend the money you obtain from a loan without losing the means to pay it back. You can do a tiny bit to borrow against your future labor income, but the normal thing to do is to declare personal bankruptcy, and so there is little assurance for that.
(This has been discussed many dozens of times on both the EA Forum and LessWrong. There exist no loan structures as far as I know that allow you to substantially benefit from predicting doom.)
Hello Habryka. Could you link to a good overview of why taking loans does not make sense even if one thinks there is a high risk of human extinction soon? Daniel Kokotajlo said:
Idk about others. I haven’t investigated serious ways to do this [taking loans],* but I’ve taken the low-hanging fruit—it’s why my family hasn’t paid off our student loan debt for example, and it’s why I went for financing on my car (with as long a payoff time as possible) instead of just buying it with cash.
*Basically I’d need to push through my ugh field and go do research on how to make this happen. If someone offered me a $10k low-interest loan on a silver platter I’d take it.
I should also clarify that I am open to bets about less extreme events. For example, global unemployment rate doubling or population dropping below 7 billion in the next few years.
I think people like me proposing public bets to whoever has extreme views or asking them whether they have considered loans should be transparent about their views. In contrast, fraude is “the crime of obtaining money or property by deceiving people”.
I did not have anything in particular in mind about what the people asking for loans would do without human extinction soon. In general, I think it makes sense for people to pay their loans. However, since I strongly endorse expected total hedonistic utilitarism, I do not put an astronomical weight on respecting contracts. So I believe not paying a loan is fine if the benefits are sufficiently large.
Fraud is bad.
In any case, people already don’t have enough worthwhile targets for donating money to, even under short timelines, so it’s not clear what good taking out loans would do. If it’s a question of putting one’s money where one’s mouth is, I personally took a 6-figure paycut in 2022 to work on reducing AI x-risk, and also increased my consumption/spending.
That’s not fraud, without more—Vasco didn’t suggest that anyone obtain loans that they did not intend to repay, or could not repay, in a no-doom world.
Every contract has an implied term that future obligations are void in the event of human extinction. There’s no shame in not paying one’s debts because extinction happened.
You cannot spend the money you obtain from a loan without losing the means to pay it back. You can do a tiny bit to borrow against your future labor income, but the normal thing to do is to declare personal bankruptcy, and so there is little assurance for that.
(This has been discussed many dozens of times on both the EA Forum and LessWrong. There exist no loan structures as far as I know that allow you to substantially benefit from predicting doom.)
Hello Habryka. Could you link to a good overview of why taking loans does not make sense even if one thinks there is a high risk of human extinction soon? Daniel Kokotajlo said:
I should also clarify that I am open to bets about less extreme events. For example, global unemployment rate doubling or population dropping below 7 billion in the next few years.
I do actually have trouble finding a good place to link to. I’ll try to dig one up in the next few days.
Thanks for clarifying, Jason.
I think people like me proposing public bets to whoever has extreme views or asking them whether they have considered loans should be transparent about their views. In contrast, fraude is “the crime of obtaining money or property by deceiving people”.
I read Vasco as suggesting exactly that—what is your understanding of what he meant, if not that?
Hi Rebecca,
I did not have anything in particular in mind about what the people asking for loans would do without human extinction soon. In general, I think it makes sense for people to pay their loans. However, since I strongly endorse expected total hedonistic utilitarism, I do not put an astronomical weight on respecting contracts. So I believe not paying a loan is fine if the benefits are sufficiently large.