Aaron Bergman

Karma: 1,026

I graduated from Georgetown University in December, 2021 with degrees in economics, mathematics and a philosophy minor. There, I founded and helped to lead Georgetown Effective Altruism. Over the last few years recent years, I’ve interned at the Department of the Interior, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Nonlinear, a newish longtermist EA org.

I’m now doing research thanks to an EA funds grant, trying to answer hard, important EA-relevant questions. My first big project (in addition to everything listed here) was helping to generate this team Red Teaming post.

Blog: aaronbergman.net

Aaron Bergman 2 Mar 2023 22:40 UTC
6 points
5
on: Why should ethical anti-realists do ethics?
Late to the party (and please forgive me if I overlooked a part where you address this), but I think this all misses the boring and kinda unsatisfying but (I’d argue) correct answer to the question posed:
Why should ethical anti-realists do ethics?
Because they might be wrong!
Ok, my less elegant, more pedantically precise claim (argument?) is that:
1. Ethical anti-realists should do ethics iff moral realism is true in such a way that includes normativity (rather than just ‘objective ordering’-flavor realism)
2. It would be good for anti-realists to do ethics iff moral realism is true (even if normativity is fake but statements like “all else equal, a world with more suffering is worse than its alternative” have truth values )
3. Anti-realism, if true, would (intrinsically) have no positive implications
  1. I know this is a controversial claim, and kinda what this whole post is about!
  2. (I initially wrote ‘anti-realism $⟹$ nihilism,’ but the latter term seems to be defined in a sentiment-laden way in several places)
4. A person who accepts the above three bulleted premises and also :
  1. Has (for whatever reason) a desire or goal to ‘do ethics’ conditional on there being good reason to do ethics
  2. Uses (for whatever reason) any procedure consistent with any form of what I’ll call “normal, prima facie non-insane, coherent decision theoretic reasoning” to make decisions...
… would in fact find him/herself (i) ‘doing ethics’ and [slightly less confident about this one] (ii) ‘doing ethics’ as though moral realism were true even if they believe that moral realism is probably not true.
[ok that’s it for the argument]🔚
Two more things...
1. It looks like Will MacAskill’s book Moral Uncertainty has a chapter on this which I haven’t engaged with, but prima facie I can’t see why his arguments concerning normative moral uncertainty wouldn’t apply at the meta-ethical level as well
2. I should note that I may be inclined towards this answer because I think anti-realists are wrong (for reasons discussed in this 80k episode )

Aaron Bergman 21 Feb 2023 0:53 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: aaronb50′s Shortform
~~In terms of result,~~ yeah it does~~, but I sorta half-intentionally left that out because I don’t actually think LLS is true as it seems to often be stated.~~
Why the strikethrough: after writing the shortform, I get that e.g., “if we know nothing more about them” and “in the absence of additional information” mean “conditional on a uniform prior,” but I didn’t get that before. And Wikipedia’s explanation of the rule,
Since we have the prior knowledge that we are looking at an experiment for which both success and failure are possible, our estimate is as if we had observed one success and one failure for sure before we even started the experiments.
seems both unconvincing as stated and, if assumed to be true, doesn’t depend on that crucial assumption

Aaron Bergman 19 Feb 2023 10:53 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Robi Rahman’s comment on: aaronb50′s Shortform
Fixed, thanks!

Aaron Bergman 19 Feb 2023 9:11 UTC
8 points
on: aaronb50′s Shortform
The recent 80k podcast on the contingency of abolition got me wondering what, if anything, the fact of slavery’s abolition says about the ex ante probability of abolition—or more generally, what one observation of a binary random variable $X$ says about $p$ as in
Turns out there is an answer (!), and it’s found starting in paragraph 3 of subsection 1 of section 3 of the Binomial distribution Wikipedia page:
A closed form Bayes estimator for p also exists when using the Beta distribution as a conjugate prior distribution. When using a general $Beta (α, β)$ ⁡ as a prior, the posterior mean estimator is...
${^p}_{b} = \frac{x + α}{n + α + β}$
[...]
For the special case of using the standard uniform distribution as a non-informative prior, $Beta (α, β) = U (0, 1)$ , the posterior mean estimator becomes: ${^p}_{b} = \frac{x + 1}{n + 2}$
Don’t worry, I had no idea what $Beta (α, β)$ was until 20 minutes ago. In the Shortform spirit, I’m gonna skip any actual explanation and just link Wikipedia and paste this image (I added the uniform distribution dotted line because why would they leave that out?)
So...
Cool, so for the $n = 1$ case, we get that if you have a prior over the ex ante probability space $[0, 1]$ described by one of those curves in the image, you...
- 0) Start from ‘zero empirical information guesstimate’ $E [Beta (α, β)] = \frac{α}{α + β}$
- 1a) observe that the thing happens $(x = 1)$ , moving you, Ideal Bayesian Agent, to updated probability ${^p}_{b} = \frac{1 + α}{1 + α + β} > \frac{α}{α + β}$ OR
- 1b) observe that the thing doesn’t happen $(x = 0)$ , moving you to updated probability ${^p}_{b} = \frac{α}{1 + α + β} < \frac{α}{α + β}$
In the uniform case (which actually seems kind of reasonable for abolition), you...
- 0) Start from prior $E [p] = 1 / 2$
- 1a) observe that the thing happens, moving you to updated probability ${^p}_{b} = 2 / 3$
- 1a) observe that the thing doesn’t happen, moving you to updated probability ${^p}_{b} = \frac{1}{3}$

Aaron Bergman 29 Jan 2023 4:00 UTC
21 points
29
on: Rethink Priorities’ Welfare Range Estimates
At risk of jeopardizing EA’s hard-won reputation of relentless internal criticism:
Even setting aside its object-level impact-relevant criteria (truth, importance, etc), this is just enormously impressive both in terms of magnitude and quality. The post itself gives us readers an anchor on which to latch critiques, questions, and comments, so it’s easy to forget that each step or decision in the whole methodology had to be chosen from an enormous space of possibilities. And this looks— at least on a first red—like very many consecutive well-made steps and decisions

Aaron Bergman 24 Jan 2023 3:59 UTC
2 points
on: aaronb50′s Shortform
Events as evidence vs. spotlights
Note: inspired by the FTX+Bostrom fiascos and associated discourse. May (hopefully) develop into longform by explicitly connecting this taxonomy to those recent events (but my base rate of completing actual posts cautions humility)
Event as evidence
- The default: normal old Bayesian evidence
  - The realm of “updates,” “priors,” and “credences”
- Pseudo-definition: Induces ^[1] a change to or within a model (of whatever the model’s user is trying to understand)
- Corresponds to models that are (as is often assumed):
  1. Well-defined (i.e. specific, complete, and without latent or hidden information)
  2. Stable except in response to ‘surprising’ new information
Event as spotlight
- Pseudo-definition: Alters the how a person views, understands, or interacts with a model, just as a spotlight changes how an audience views what’s on stage
  - In particular, spotlights change the salience of some part of a model
- This can take place both/either:
  - At an individual level (think spotlight before an audience of one); and/or
  - To a community’s shared model (think spotlight before an audience of many)
- They can also which information latent in a model is functionally available to a person or community, just as restricting one’s field of vision increases the resolution of whichever part of the image shines through
Example
1. You’re hiking a bit of the Appalachian Trail with two friends, going north, using the following of a map (the “external model”)
2. An hour in, your mental/internal model probably looks like this:
3. Event: ~~the collapse of a financial institution~~ you hear traffic
  1. As evidence, this causes you to change where you think you are—namely, a bit south of the first road you were expecting to cross
  2. As spotlight, this causes the three of you to stare at the same map as before model but in such a way that your internal models are all very similar, each looking something like this
Really the crop should be shifted down some but I don’t feel like redoing it rn
1. ^
  Or fails to induce

Aaron Bergman 3 Jan 2023 18:18 UTC

13 points

on: aaronb50′s Shortform

A few Forum meta things you might find useful or interesting:

Two super basic interactive data viz apps
1. 1) How often (in absolute and relative terms) a given forum topic appears with another given topic
2. 2) Visualizing the popularity of various tags
An updated Forum scrape including the full text and attributes of 10k-ish posts as of Christmas, ’22
1. See the data without full text in Google Sheets here
2. Post explaining version 1.0 from a few months back
From the data in no. 2, a few effortposts that never garnered an accordant amount of attention (qualitatively filtered from posts with (1) long read times (2) modest positive karma (3) not a ton of comments.
1. Columns labels should be (left to right):
  1. Title/link
  2. Author(s)
  3. Date posted
  4. Karma (as of a week ago)
  5. Comments (as of a week ago)


`Open Philanthropy: Our Approach to Recruiting a Strong Team`	pmk	10/23/2021	11	0
`Histories of Value Lock-in and Ideology Critique`	clem	9/2/2022	11	1
`Why I think strong general AI is coming soon`	porby	9/28/2022	13	1
`Anthropics and the Universal Distribution`	Joe_Carlsmith	11/28/2021	18	0
`Range and Forecasting Accuracy`	niplav	5/27/2022	12	2
`A Pin and a Balloon: Anthropic Fragility Increases Chances of Runaway Global Warming`	turchin	9/11/2022	16	1
`Strategic considerations for effective wild animal suffering work`	Animal_Ethics	1/18/2022	21	0
`Red teaming a model for estimating the value of longtermist interventions - A critique of Tarsney's "The Epistemic Challenge to Longtermism"`	Anjay F, Chris Lonsberry, Bryce Woodworth	7/16/2022	21	0
`Welfare stories: How history should be written, with an example (early history of Guam)`	kbog	1/2/2020	18	1
`Summary of Evidence, Decision, and Causality`	Dawn Drescher	9/5/2020	27	0
`Some AI research areas and their relevance to existential safety`	Andrew Critch	12/15/2020	27	0
`Maximizing impact during consulting: building career capital, direct work and more.`	Vaidehi Agarwalla, Jakob, Jona, Peter4444	8/13/2021	21	2
`Independent Office of Animal Protection`	Animal Ask, Ren Springlea	11/22/2022	21	2
`Investigating how technology-focused academic fields become self-sustaining`	Ben Snodin, Megan Kinniment	9/6/2021	25	2
`Using artificial intelligence (machine vision) to increase the effectiveness of human-wildlife conflict mitigations could benefit WAW`	Rethink Priorities, Tapinder Sidhu	10/28/2022	22	3
`Crucial questions about optimal timing of work and donations`	MichaelA	8/14/2020	28	4
`Will we eventually be able to colonize other stars? Notes from a preliminary review`	Nick_Beckstead	6/22/2014	29	7
`Philanthropists Probably Shouldn't Mission-Hedge AI Progress`	MichaelDickens	8/23/2022	27	9

Aaron Bergman 19 Dec 2022 10:53 UTC
3 points
on: aaronb50′s Shortform
A resource that might be useful: https://tinyapps.org/
There’s a ton there, but one anecdote from yesterday: referred me to this $5 IOS desktop app which (among other more reasonable uses) made me this full quality, fully intra-linked >3600 page PDF of (almost) every file/site linked to by every file/site linked to from Tomasik’s homepage (works best with old-timey simpler sites like that)

Aaron Bergman 19 Dec 2022 9:09 UTC
4 points
0
on: The Welfare Range Table
Nice! (admit I’ve only just skimmed and looked at the eye-catching graphics and tables 🙃). A couple small potential improvements to those things:
1. Is a higher-quality/bigger file version of the infographic available? Shouldn’t matter, of course, but may as well put it on a fair memetic playing field with all the other beautiful charts out there
2. Would you consider adding a few “reference” columns to the Welfare Range Table, in particular values for:
  1. Human (or perhaps “human if introspection is epistemically meaningful and qualia exist”)
  2. Organisms from other kingdoms: plant, bacteria, etc. (I think any single one without nervous tissue would suffice)
  3. A representative (very probable) non-moral patient physical object (“rock”)
  4. Less important (intuitively to me) potential additions:
    chatGPT
    Video game character or anything else that “behaves” in some sense like an advanced organism but is ontologically very different
    any other contrarian counterexample things that might push the limits of the taxonomy’s applicability (maybe ‘Roomba’ or ‘the IOS operating system’ or ‘a p-zombie’ ?)

Aaron Bergman 19 Dec 2022 3:51 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Matt_Sharp’s comment on: Buy yourself a combo CO₂/air quality monitor
Thank you—fixed!

Aaron Bergman 18 Dec 2022 6:00 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Karthik Tadepalli’s comment on: Buy yourself a combo CO₂/air quality monitor
A monitor will only benefit you if you act on its readings by a) buying a purifier, b) avoiding areas with pollution. If you install the monitor at home you don’t really have the option to avoid it so a) is the only viable path to impact I see.
Eh it’s gonna depend on the particulars of each living situation but I think there are a bunch of dials/levers the monitor can cause you to adjust:
Usual/common
- Central air (is that the right term?):
  - temperature
  - speed (including off/on)
  - which vents are open
- Windows
- Doors open/closed/cracked
- Fans (potentially even a cheap USB-powered one)
  - speed
  - direction
- Air purifier (+quantity/price/quality/speed/noise)
- (De)humidifier (idk if these have an affect on air quality but plausible)
- Which room you work in (ik not everyone has this or other choices on the list)
- Plants (I think the effect size is usually too small but not certain)
Potentially also:
- Moving (residences/cities)
- When you work/move/go elsewhere
  - e.g., going to the library if C02 hits 1000 ppm when roommate is having friends over
- Wearing a mask (at least potentially idk)
- Which cleaning/scent products you buy and use
- Which appliances you buy (like electric vs gas stove)
More important than “tweak each dial 2%” though, is that I think during some small but non-trivial proportion of user-hours (5-10%?), the user would discover that their working environment is bad enough to warrant a more dramatic change than “crack a window and turn on a fan,” which they wouldn’t make without direct immediate feedback from a monitor. I’m not certain though of course, and certainly could be wrong about this!

Aaron Bergman 18 Dec 2022 4:00 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: MHR’s comment on: Buy yourself a combo CO₂/air quality monitor
I don’t want to make too strong a claim here; my current guess is basically “C02 doesn’t (at normalish levels) decrease intelligence per se; it makes you tired and lazy” (so playing a fun and low executive function game less affected perhaps?) On the other hand I recently learned that it’s anxiogenic, which intuitively points in the opposite direction of arousal so I really don’t know...
On the other other hand, compare air quality at large to, say, “temperature while studying,” where the outcome variable measured is final grade. Would I really get worse grades if it was always 75° instead of 65°? I’m not sure, but even null result RCT for air conditioning affect on academic performance or math problems completed in a minute wouldn’t convince me that temperature has no causal effect on cognition-intensive tasks; ceteris paribus is ~impossible to achieve!

Buy yourself a combo CO₂/air quality monitor

Aaron Bergman18 Dec 2022 0:00 UTC

19 points

12 comments6 min readEA link

Aaron Bergman’s shortform

Aaron Bergman15 Dec 2022 1:09 UTC

2 points

18 comments1 min readEA link

Aaron Bergman 15 Dec 2022 1:09 UTC
3 points
on: aaronb50′s Shortform
New Thing
Last week I complained about not being able to see all the top shortform posts in one list. Thanks to Lorenzo for pointing me to the next best option:
...the closest I found is https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/allPosts?sortedBy=topAdjusted&timeframe=yearly&filter=all, you can see the inflation-adjusted top posts and shortforms by year.
It wasn’t too hard to put together a text doc with (at least some of each of) all 1470ish shortform posts, which you can view or download here.
- Pros: (practically) infinite scroll of insight porn
- Cons:
  - longer posts get cut off at about 300 words
  - Each post is an ugly block of text
  - No links to the original post [see doc for more]
- Various other disclaimers/notes at the top of the document
I was starting to feel like the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie’s eternally-doomed protagonist (it’ll look presentable if I just do this one more thing), so I’m cutting myself off here to see whether it might be worth me (or someone else) making it better.
Newer Thing (?)
- I do think this could be an MVP (minimal viable product) for a much nicer-looking and readable document, such as:
  - “this but without the posts cut off and with spacing figured out”
  - “nice-looking searchable pdf with original media and formatting”
  - “WWOTF-level-production book and audiobook”
  - Any of those ^ three options but only for the top 10/100/n posts
  - So by all means, copy and paste and turn it into something better!
Oh yeah and, if you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend going through the top Shortform posts for each of the last four years here

Aaron Bergman 9 Dec 2022 20:50 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Lorenzo Buonanno’s comment on: aaronb50′s Shortform
Late but thanks on both, and commented there!

Aaron Bergman 9 Dec 2022 20:48 UTC
12 points
on: EA Forum feature suggestion thread
For Shortform:
1. The link to get here from the main page is awfully small and inconspicuous (1 of 145 individual links on the page according to a Chrome extension)
  1. I can imagine it being near/stylistically like:
    “All Posts” (top of sidebar)
    “Recommendations” in the center
    “Frontpage Posts”, but to the main section’s side or maybe as a replacement for it you can easily toggle back and forth from
2. Would be cool to be able to sort and aggregate like with the main posts (nothing to filter by afaik)
  1. I’d really appreciate being able to see the highest-scoring Shortform posts ever, but afaik can’t easily do that atm

Aaron Bergman 6 Dec 2022 3:13 UTC
3 points
on: aaronb50′s Shortform
Infinitely easier said than done, of course, but some Shortform feedback/requests
1. The link to get here from the main page is awfully small and inconspicuous (1 of 145 individual links on the page according to a Chrome extension)
  1. I can imagine it being near/stylistically like:
    “All Posts” (top of sidebar)
    “Recommendations” in the center
    “Frontpage Posts”, but to the main section’s side or maybe as a replacement for it you can easily toggle back and forth from
2. Would be cool to be able to sort and aggregate like with the main posts (nothing to filter by afaik)
  1. I’d really appreciate being able to see the highest-scoring Shortform posts ever, but afaik can’t easily do that atm.
What links here?
- Aaron Bergman's comment on Aaron Bergman’s shortform by Aaron Bergman (15 Dec 2022 1:09 UTC; 3 points)

Aaron Bergman 22 Nov 2022 21:06 UTC
12 points
on: aaronb50′s Shortform
So the EA Forum has, like, an ancestor? Is this common knowledge? Lol
Felicifia: not functional anymore but still available to view. Learned about thanks to a Tweet from Jacy
From Felicifia Is No Longer Accepting New Users:
Update: threw together
- some data with authors, post title names, date, and number of replies (and messed one section up so some rows are missing links)
- A rather long PDF with the posts and replies together (for quick keyword searching), with decent but not great formatting

Aaron Bergman 16 Nov 2022 4:25 UTC
1 point
on: aaronb50′s Shortform
Ok so things that get posted in the Shortform tab also appear in your (my) shortform post , which can be edited to not have the title “___′s shortform” and also has a real post body that is empty by default but you can just put stuff in.
There’s also the usual “frontpage” checkbox, so I assume an individual’s own shortform page can appear alongside normal posts(?).
The link is: [Draft] Used to be called “Aaron Bergman’s shortform” (or smth)
I assume only I can see this but gonna log out and check
What links here?
- Aaron Bergman's comment on Aaron Bergman’s shortform by Aaron Bergman (16 Nov 2022 4:25 UTC; 1 point)

Aaron Bergman

^pb=x+αn+α+β

So...

Events as evidence vs. spotlights

Event as evidence

Event as spotlight

Example

Buy your­self a combo CO₂/​air qual­ity monitor

Aaron Bergman’s shortform

New Thing

Newer Thing (?)

${^p}_{b} = \frac{x + α}{n + α + β}$

Buy yourself a combo CO₂/air quality monitor