A wayward math-muddler for bizarre designs, artificial intelligence options, and spotting trends no one wanted; articles on Medium as Anthony Repetto
Anthony Repetto
Karma: −84
Seeking a Collaboration to Stop Hurricanes?
Ah, yes! I have found my slice of the forum! If anyone is in these domains who would like to dive further into conversation, potential collaboration, that is key for me. I’ll link to the various articles I’ve written over the years, or at least leave a blurb, on a number of these topics:
Great Power Conflict: 1) China wants Pakistan, and may walk in as ‘peacekeepers’ to subdue the Baluchi people, or protect Pakistan from India. Either way, they have a railroad and port to circumvent India and the Strait of Malacca. 2) Life-extension gives dictators the power to torture forever, which they will use as SOON as they can, to exert influence over their people. Meanwhile, henchmen will want to kill the boss—it’s the only way to get a promotion. Sabotage is likely, and conflict will be blamed on enemies, instigating wider conflicts.
Global Governance & Public Goods: 1) I explore the core constraints I see for any method which might internalize most externalities as much as possible. 2) I see sea-steading as an opportunity for the ‘True Fans’ of each political ideology to form their own government… and so, they cannot blame their failure upon anyone else! We desperately need these experiments in political methodology, to determine which ones actually work. With sea-steading, we will finally have willing volunteers and no restrictions. 3) We can ask each person “Which people do you admire, and why?” Follow-up with those admired people, to see who they admire; step-by-step this way you find the most admirable folks.
Outer Space Governance: I identify a few of the key dynamics of space industry, and the immense value of the planet Mercury, which is likely to become the primary source of contention in the coming centuries.
Voting Reform: 1) I identified an unexplored avenue that may allow fair, non-strategic voting (Gibbard’s Theorem only applies to ranked-list data-types, while latent-space vectors allow more powerful operations in their algorithms). 2) I have pushed for a switch toward a volumetric assessment of the combined concerns and interests of the entire population, updated electronically without waiting for elections, as a mandate for government activity, as distinct from one side being ignored for four years at a time and politicians ignoring the issues concerning us most.
Malevolent Actors & Lie-Detection: IIRC, EEGs are able to spot folks with the dark triad, because the region of their brain responsible for projecting their feeling empathically is simply dysfunctional. I expect that sea-steading will allow communities to explicitly BAN anyone who cannot pass the EEG for empathic responses. Successful reduction in crime and corruption in those places would be the proof motivating adoption in ‘stickier’ countries.
Economic Growth: 1) To subsidize super-abundant computer power, as well as re-establish a single dominant reserve currency after the decline of the petro-dollar, we could push to make the US dollar backed by computer hardware. Each computer chip can be ‘bound’ to a crypto-token, (using Samsung’s patented method for on-chip encryption, which takes advantage of unique defects to make a key that ONLY that computer chip can use) and as those computer chips sit in servers, running the internet & businesses, apps, then the token-owner is paid a dividend from that activity. 2) Wealth experiences a positive feedback, simply by possessing it. I argue for a progressive-rate wealth tax, beginning negative as a rebate, exemptions for home, farm, and first biz, hefty cuts for leaving citizenship. Without such a damper, wealth will always concentrate, until it destroys us.
Scientific Policy: Researchers need a devoted team of supporters who can make videos and publicize the research proposals, as a ‘Kickstarter’, so that scientist can get to work without wasting time writing grants and being rejected.
Lie-Detection: Artificial Intelligence can be used to spot bias in a human judge—the A.I. is trained to imitate that person’s past decisions; then, you can quiz the A.I. to spot bias, because its ‘frozen’ brain doesn’t remember your previous questions, and doesn’t think to lie.
Wild Animal Welfare: 1) I recommend reading “The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography”—because, when we reduce habitat, all those diverse species will still be present, YET they are consistently losing allele diversity until their total species diversity collapses in a cascade. I fear that we have a few centuries before “inbreeding” kills most biomes, and we have no way to find “good” alleles to give them, once they lose the ones they have. Each decade is the loss of millions of years of allele experimentation, with no hope of a quantum computer large enough to simulate nature properly. 2) Terra Preta do Indo is one of the best soil types—and it was made by natives 3,000 years ago. If we invest more into soil science, to recreate this anthropogenic soil, we can build lasting fertility instead of deserts.
Climate Impacts: I recently posted about a possible avenue worth simulating, to get a cost-estimate, for using water spouts (humidity-twisters forming over water) might prevent hurricanes.
I am glad to go into greater detail; I’ll be posting more about each on the EA Forum, bit by bit. Let me know what you’d like me to cover, first!
This aged well… and it reads like what ChatGPT would blurt, if you asked it to “sound like a convincingly respectful and calm cult with no real output.” Your ‘Anti-Avoidance,’ in particular, is deliciously Orwellian. “You’re just avoiding the truth, you’re just confused...”
I was advocating algal and fish farming, including bubbling air into the water and sopping-up the fish poop with crabs and bivalves—back in 2003. Spent a few years trying to tell any marine biologist I could. Fish farming took-off, years later, and recently they realized you should bubble air and catch the poop! I consider that a greater real-world accomplishment than your ‘training 60+ people on anti-avoidance of our pseudo-research.’ Could you be more specific about Connection Theory, and the experimental design of the research you conducted and pre-registered, to determine that it was correct? I’m sure you’d have to get into some causality-weeds, so those experimental designs are going to be top-notch, right? Or, is it just Geoff writing with the rigor of Freud on a Slack he deleted?
I’d also like to ask clarification about your last sentence: I said ‘nerds’, and that may be what you found particularly offensive, there; or, that I hypothesize that men in those organizations are hiring hoping for a date? I am not attempting to ‘blame a woman’ for getting a job, by the way—I am pointing to the people who are doing the hiring for potentially selfish reasons.
Yes, I understand that funding can let me hire people to do that work—and I don’t need funding to free my time. I understand that, if I delay for the sake of doing-it-alone, then I am responsible for that additional harm. It doesn’t make sense for me to run a simulation or lobby by myself; and I’ve been in the position of hiring people, as well as working with people who are internally motivated. I hoped to find the internally motivated people, first—that’s why I asked EA for connections, instead of just posting something on a job site.
I apologize for lumping your funding-suggestion along-side others’ funding-misrepresentation. I see that you are looking for ways to make it possible, and funding is what came to mind. Thank you.
(I am still surprised that funding is continually the first topic, after I specify that the government is the best institution to finance such a project. EA would go bankrupt, if they tried to stop hurricanes...)
And, I understand if people don’t consider my proposal promising—I am not demanding that they divert resources, especially funds which are best spent on highest guaranteed impact! Yet, there is a cliquishness in excluding diverse dialogue based upon “social capital/reputation”—I hope you can see that the social graph’s connectivity falls apart when we cut those ties.
It’s also odd that the only data-point used to evaluate me would be the slice of time immediately after I’d been prodded repeatedly. I wish I could hand you the video-tapes of my life, and let you evaluate me rightly. When I am repeatedly misrepresented, defending myself, then you don’t see a representative slice of who I am.
Worst of all, no measure of my persona or character is a measure of the worth of a thought. If I am not a good fit for making it happen, then the best I can do I find someone who fits that well. The idea itself stands or falls on its own merits, and measuring me ignores that. I won’t know if it’s worth doing until I have a simulation, at least. I don’t know how anyone else has certainty on the matter, especially from such a noisy proxy as “perceived tone via text message”.
Internalizing Externalities
I am terrified that you were downvoted to obscurity. These posts, the ones that EA hides, are the ones the public needs to see the most.
“Remember that the marginal value of another HEA is way lower than the marginal value of an actual legitimate criticism of EA nobody else has considered yet.”
Thank you for saying it!
Thank you for your detailed response! I am glad when we explore the design-space; to find a decent idea, we must find the patterns amongst many.
In regards to each specific option you mentioned:
futarchy hopes to create a prediction-market, and reward those who make good predictions, yet it does nothing to reward those who invest in the implementation of beneficial projects, the key difference.
Eliezer is looking for a way to coordinate crowd actions; again, the people who invest time and resources are not rewarded directly and materially for funding those benefits.
pigovian taxes, for negative externalities, are included in my line of reasoning, yet they miss the key point again: material reward for those who invest in beneficial projects.
partisan cost-benefit discussions are commonly among elected officials prior to knowing the truth; I contrast that with verification that policy performed as expected, carried-out by apolitical experts randomly assigned, by metrics agreed upon in legislation, in line with the concepts of principled negotiation (see Bill Ury’s classic “Getting to Yes”). I have no expectation that a legislature should ever determine the worth of each proposal—they’d never finish! And I would be glad to pass a ban on political parties at a Constitutional Convention, though I know that won’t happen. Instead, I expect we will need to start from scratch, in which case a foundation of apolitical metrics is better than none.
quadratic funding is nice, to balance the interests of the majority, yet again it does nothing to directly and materially reward those who invest in the solutions. A hope that the coin functions better, maintaining its value or increasing in value, is only a secondary reward, and that reward is focused in the hands of the largest holders.
So, the key difference I have with all of those mentioned is that I propose an incentive for regular, self-interested investors to pay for benefits. That certainly would not happen in each other method. (And yes, those taxes and dividends would be retroactive, similar to the prizes for social good you mentioned.) Without material rewards for the investors, we will only pull a few tens of billions in philanthropic dollars toward benefits every year, while my goal is to internalize externalities in totality or close to it.
This is a critical distinction, because there are a few hundred trillion dollars sloshing around in businesses and real estate, NOT because the investors like capitalism—rather, they like a high rate of return! :0 Due to the efficiencies available in the space of positive externalities, we can give investors that rate of return, while keeping the lion’s share of the benefits in the public. Investors would look at their distribution of assets and say “oh, I was only holding this real estate as a HEDGE against inflation, I’d rather put my cash into a diversified portfolio of public benefits, because they earn an annual return of greater than 12%!” That’s how we can get tens of trillions thrown toward beneficent work. Just give them enough cash back that they are happy. (...and, that shift in assets would lower the price of urban real estate, once they clear out of it!)
[[It’s also worth noting that the article you gave to dismiss wealth taxes only showed that “European countries had all kinds of weird exemptions, while they didn’t exclude basics like your farm or small business, so some people suffered… they also let the millionaires leave—which they did.” Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax plan, in contrast, is shown in that same article to address those concerns. Compared to the disincentives from sales tax and income tax, I’d prefer a progressive-rate wealth tax only, with a hefty cut taken from those who leave citizenship behind.]]
I see some form of governance as essential to enforce taxation; and that taxation is the only reliable means to gather the broadly-distributed value of most positive externalities, in order to reward investors. Without that reward-structure, we’re leaving tens of trillions of dollars on the table, when we could be spending that on public benefit. So, what might that governance look like? A smart contract, binding sea-steaders into a loose federation, perhaps? I look forward to any other ideas that come up! It should seek to internalize as much as possible, ideally leaving no externality untouched, so that pricing is an accurate representation of public value, and allocation is efficient. Then, I wouldn’t be so worried about markets ruining planets. :)
Alistair, I regret to inform you that after four years of Leverage’s Anti-Avoidance Training, the cancer has spread: the EA Community at large is now repeatedly aghast that outsiders are noticing their subtle rug-sweeping of sexual harassment and dismissal of outside critique. In barely a decade, the self-described rats are swum ‘round a stinking sh!p. I’m still amazed that, for the last year, as I kept bringing-forth concerns and issues, the EA members each insisted ‘no problems here, no, never, we’re always so perfect....’ Yep. It shows.
Thank you for recognizing that my concern was not addressed. I should mention, I am also not operating from an assumption of ‘intrinsically against me’ - it’s an unusually specific reaction that I’ve received on this forum, in particular. So, I’m glad that you have spoken-up in favor of due consideration. My stomach knots thank you :)
A Response to OpenPhil’s R&D Model
Here are the less contentious parts, I hope?
“Ben Delo’s involvement with EA just quietly stopped being talked about without any kind of public reflection on what could be done better moving forwards.”
“Failing to share information because you suspect it will make me less supportive or more critical of your views, decisions, or actions smells of overconfidence and makes you difficult to trust, and this has regularly happened to me in my engagement with EA.”
Yes, exactly. Thank you! EA Berkeley had to remove their leader just two years ago, for reasons that none of the membership there is willing to even mention—which makes it sound particularly bad, which means that ‘the fact that EA is keeping that bad stuff hidden’ is even worse.
Similarly, EA Berkeley members were targeted by a higher-up for blacklisting, and mentioned such in emails to me, only to go silent on the matter until I brought-up the blacklisting as an issue on their slack. At that point, they mentioned that “we’ve been in private talks with the Blacklister, asking them to stop their behavior”—nothing public until absolutely necessary.
The EA houses in Berkeley, who are a magnet for EA Berkeley campus members to move-into (most residents are post-grads who were EA Berkeley prior to graduation and moving into the EA house), had repeatedly splurged unnecessarily, and when I pointed this out, the near-universal response on the EA Berkeley slack was ‘well, that’s them, not us. We’re not responsible for anyone else in our org if they’re committing petty fraud.’ The slack poster Charles He even suggested that I be banned from their slack, for ‘disrupting’ things by bringing-up their bad behavior!
EA definitely has a brand they’re protecting, and other posters seem to be bumping into other icky spots under the surface, too! (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eoLwR3y2gcZ8wgECc/hubris-and-coldness-within-ea-my-experience) & “Power dynamics: What procedures exist for protecting parties in asymmetric power relationships? Are there adequate opportunities for anonymous complaints or concerns to be raised? How are high-status individuals held accountable in the event of wrongdoing?” from (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sEpWkCvvJfoEbhnsd/the-ftx-crisis-highlights-a-deeper-cultural-problem-within)
Further: when I have posted new ideas on this forum, I was repeatedly strawmanned by EA members until other members eventually pointed-out that I was being strawmanned, and those who did so never admitted and apologized; they just downvoted every comment I made, as a team. EA protects the trolls who downvote-mafia and misrepresent, while looking for reasons to exclude ‘non-aligned views’.
Behaving decently is nice; that doesn’t remove the point I was asking about: ignoring the other arguments I brought-up. It seems, repeatedly, that the call of appropriateness is used to ignore the substance of the other arguments; which continues to be the case, in this thread.
Well, there’s a simple empirical measure, rather than relying on whether an argument is approved-of or not: Do any of them date? Are they hoping to keep that fact hidden?
Make the Drought Evaporate!
Geopolitical Hazards of Sea-Steading
I am frustrated that I am repeatedly misrepresented, which is what I said in my responses. I am not frustrated by a lack of “people doing leg work for me”. I am specifically asking if anyone has connections toward the relevant specialists, so that I can talk to those specialists. I’m not sure why that would be “something I should do on my own”—I’m literally reaching out to gather specialists, which is the first leg work, obviously. Re-inventing the wheel to impress an audience by “going it alone” is actually counter-productive.
I don’t need a “fully general engine”—you are misrepresenting my request, as others have. I am asking if anyone knows someone with the relevant background. I am NOT asking for funding, nor a general protocol that addresses every post. Those are strawmen. No one has apologized for these strawmen; they just ghost the conversation.
And, if you are using the fact that I stood-up to repeated mis-representations as “telegraph a sense of powerlessness and sometimes vulnerability”, and as a result, I should not be taken seriously, then you are squashing the only means of recourse available to me. When my request is repeatedly mis-represented, and I respond to each of them, I am necessarily “repeatedly posting”—I’m not sure why that noisy proxy for “lack of effectiveness” is a better signal for you than actually reading what I wrote.
“If it’s also sufficiently likely that some people could figure this out and put us on a better path, then it seems really bad that we might be putting off those very people.”
Here! When I was twelve, I spent four years finding the best way to benefit others, then I developed my skill-set to pursue a career in it… 26 years ago. So, I might qualify as one of those motivated altruists who is turned-off by the response they’ve gotten from EA. I think I’m one of the people you want to listen to carefully:
I don’t need funding—I already devote 100% of my time as I choose, and I’m glad to give it all to each cause. I am looking to have the 1-to-2 hour long, 2-to-5 person thoughtful conversation, on literally dozens of existing and EA-adjacent topics. I am not looking for a 30min. networking/elevator-pitch at a conference, because I’m not trying to get hired as a PA. I am not looking for the meandering, noisy, distracted banter at a brief social event. This forum, unfortunately, has presented me with consistent misrepresentations and fallacies, which the commentators refuse to address when I point them out. Slack is similarly incapable of the deeper, thoughtful conversations, with members and outsiders, that fosters insight and understanding.
There are numerous ideas, opportunities, methods, that are going un-noticed because of the barriers placed in front of thoughtful dialogue. It is a burden that should rest upon those EAs who are dismissive of deeper conversation, instead of being the “price I have to pay, to prove myself, before anyone will listen”, as I was most recently told on this Forum.