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.
Blog: aaronbergman.net
Eh I’m not actually sure how bad this would be. Of course it could be overdone, but a post’s author is its obvious best advocate, and a simple “I think this deserves more attention” vote doesn’t seem necessarily illegitimate to me
I think the proxy question is “after what period of time is it reasonable to assume that any work building or expanding on the post would have been published?” and my intuition here is about 1 year but would be interested in hearing others thoughts
I went ahead and made an “Evergreen” tag as proposed in my quick take from a while back:
Meant to highlight that a relatively old post (perhaps 1 year or older?) still provides object level value to read i.e., above and beyond:
It’s value as a cultural or historical artifact above
The value of more recent work it influenced or inspired
What’s are some questions you hope someone’s gonna ask that seem relatively unlikely to get asked organically?
Bonus: what are the answers to those questions?
Aside from RP, what is your best guess for the org that is morally best to give money to?
Idea/suggestion: an “Evergreen” tag, for old (6 months month? 1 year? 3 years?) posts (comments?), to indicate that they’re still worth reading (to me, ideally for their intended value/arguments rather than as instructive historical/cultural artifacts)
As an example, I’d highlight Log Scales of Pleasure and Pain, which is just about 4 years old now.
I know I could just create a tag, and maybe I will, but want to hear reactions and maybe generate common knowledge.
Thanks! Let me write them as a loss function in python (ha)
For real though:
Some flavor of hedonic utilitarianism
I guess I should say I have moral uncertainty (which I endorse as a thing) but eh I’m pretty convinced
Longtermism as explicitly defined is true
Don’t necessarily endorse the cluster of beliefs that tend to come along for the ride though
“Suffering focused total utilitarian” is the annoying phrase I made up for myself
I think many (most?) self-described total utilitarians give too little consideration/weight to suffering, and I don’t think it really matters (if there’s a fact of the matter) whether this is because of empirical or moral beliefs
Maybe my most substantive deviation from the default TU package is the following (defended here):
“Under a form of utilitarianism that places happiness and suffering on the same moral axis and allows that the former can be traded off against the latter, one might nevertheless conclude that some instantiations of suffering cannot be offset or justified by even an arbitrarily large amount of wellbeing.”
Moral realism for basically all the reasons described by Rawlette on 80k but I don’t think this really matters after conditioning on normative ethical beliefs
Nothing besides valenced qualia/hedonic tone has intrinsic value
I think that might literally be it—everything else is contingent!
Some shrinsight (shrimpsight?) from the comments:
I’m pretty happy with how this “Where should I donate, under my values?” Manifold market has been turning out. Of course all the usual caveats pertaining to basically-fake “prediction” markets apply, but given the selection effects of who spends manna on an esoteric market like this I put a non-trivial weight into the (live) outcomes.
I guess I’d encourage people with a bit more money to donate to do something similar (or I guess defer, if you think I’m right about ethics!), if just as one addition to your portfolio of donation-informing considerations.
Done, thanks!
Even given no electricity, copies stored physically in e.g. a flash drive or hard drive would persist until electricity could be supplied, I’m almost certain
Just chiming in to say I have a similar situation, although less extreme. Was vegan for 4 years and eventually concluded it wasn’t sustainable or realistic for me. Main animal products I buy are grass fed beef, grass fed whey protein, eggs from brands that at least go to decent lengths to make themselves seem non-horrible (3rd party humane certified, outdoor access) and a bit of conventional dairy (cheese, butter). I’d be lying if I said I’ve never bought anything “worse” than those, though.
I’ve definitely thought about this and short answer: depends on who “we” is.
A sort of made up particular case I was imagining is “New Zealand is fine, everywhere else totally destroyed” because I think it targets the general class of situation most in need of action (I can justify this on its own terms but I’ll leave it for now)
In that world, there’s a lot of information that doesn’t get lost: everything stored in the laptops and servers/datacenters of New Zealand (although one big caveat and the reason I abandoned the website is that I lost confidence that info physically encoded in eg a cloud server in NZ would be de facto accessible without a lot of the internet’s infrastructure physically located elsewhere), everything in all its university libraries, etc.
That is a gigantic amount of info, and seems to pretty clearly satisfy the “general info to rebuild society” thing. FWIW I think this holds if only a medium size city were to remain intact, not certain if it’s say a single town in Northern Canada, probably not a tiny fishing village, but in the latter case it’s hard to know what a tractable intervention would be.
But what does get lost? Anything niche enough not to be downloaded on a random NZers computer or in a physical book in a library. Not everything I put in the archive, to be sure, but probably most of it.
Also, 21GB of the type of info I think you’re getting at is in the “non EA info for the post apocalypse folder” because why not! :)
I have only a vague idea what this means but yeah, whatever facilitates access/storage. Is there anything I should do?
It’s actually been a little while since I made it, but places most likely to both (1) not be direct targets of a nuclear attack and (2) be uncorrelated with the fates of major datacenters plausibly holding the information currently
I tried making a shortform → Twitter bot (ie tweet each new top level ~quick take~) and long story short it stopped working and wasn’t great to begin with.
I feel like this is the kind of thing someone else might be able to do relatively easily. If so, I and I think much of EA Twitter would appreciate it very much! In case it’s helpful for this, a quick takes RSS feed is at https://ea.greaterwrong.com/shortform?format=rss
Pardon my french but
It’s not at all obvious to me that marginal carbon actually cashes out as bad even in expectation.