Ben Dean

Karma: 16

Ben Dean 19 Apr 2023 5:27 UTC
1 point
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on: What concrete question would you like to see debated? I might organise some debates.
Unsolicited procedural suggestions:
- It might be helpful for a third party to take notes in a real time argument map. There is a technique for this called “flowing” in high school / college debate in the US: https://thedebateguru.weebly.com/flowing.html
- Maybe consider hybrid text / oral debates? Each participant could have a written document of their position to start with. These would be more information dense than speeches. Like meetings at Amazon, where everybody apparently spends the first 10 minutes reading a text memo.

Ben Dean 18 Apr 2023 23:53 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: jackchang110’s comment on: Asking for important college major advices- should I study medicine?
1. If you already have a technical background like bioinformatics or maybe even hardware, I think you could learn the sort of web development stuff they do at big tech companies in a few months of self-study or less, at least at a junior level. A lot of programming and CS skills are very general and transferable. ML researcher is more specialized and a master’s / PhD would probably help. But you might be able to skip the postgraduate degree by e.g. getting an ML ops job first, or just with lots of self-study. Note that I only have experience in software / web dev. I’m not sure what the answer to your question about career change at 50 is… I’m sure it’s possible, but I have heard it gets harder to find software jobs because of ageism
2. Hm, I think the question about cause areas changing is really hard, and I don’t know the answer.
Finally, I think it’s hard to say you’re interested in something
Fair enough! It is good that you are interested in a lot of fields

Ben Dean 18 Apr 2023 5:02 UTC
6 points
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on: Asking for important college major advices- should I study medicine?
To answer your question about CS (I’m a programmer): Generally, I think your impression that it’s easy to change jobs and subfields is right. My coworker at a web app company used to do some kind of bioinformatics thing, for example. Many CS jobs care less about credentials, so self-study is usually an option.

More generally: Do you have a sense of what you want to do, like what you would actually find more interesting? This is important even just in terms of maximizing impact IMO, and of course it also matters for its own sake.

Also, echoing comments on your other post—this stuff is inherently uncertain, you realistically won’t be able to perfectly plan out your career, and that’s fine.
加油!

Ben Dean 18 Jan 2023 22:13 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: michaelB’s comment on: Book critique of Effective Altruism
How dare EA/utilitarianism prioritize other things
I think a more likely explanation of the authors’ position includes cruxes like:
...

Speaking generally, it does seem like EA critics often equivocate between these two positions. For example, saying EA is bad for diverting money from soup kitchens to bednets but not being willing to say money should be diverted the other way. IMO focus on philosophical issues like utilitarianism can have the effect of equivocating further by implying more specific disagreements without really defending them.

(I don’t have any opinions about this book in particular).

Ben Dean 26 Oct 2022 22:17 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: david_reinstein’s comment on: [Linkpost] A Response to Rebecca Ackermann’s “Inside Effective Altruism” Editorial
Link should be to hypothes.is, right?

Ben Dean 8 Jun 2022 19:36 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: EA Debate Championship & Lecture Series
I did Policy Debate, the format from that video, in high school and college. Policy Debate has its problems, but I think the fast delivery style is good on balance, since it lets a single debate cover so much ground. Speed reading is comprehensible with practice. Here’s an example from college debate with better audio quality—definitely weird, but clear enough to understand.

Ben Dean 12 Apr 2022 4:55 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: Dismantling Hedonism-inspired Moral Realism
I think an important distinction is that her position focuses on the intrinsic nature of pleasure and pain as feelings, not any relationship they have either to some even more fundamental concept of “objective value” or to our judgements, thoughts, and desires. We know pleasure feels good in the same way we know what the redness of red is like. Defining pleasure in terms of behaviors, beliefs, or desires can’t capture this in the same way that the wavelength of red light doesn’t convey the experience of seeing red. The power of this argument comes from taking this direct concept of phenomenal goodness (“feels good”) and inflating it into a full fledged account of moral goodness (hedonic utilitarianism).

Put another way: If we started out with no language for normativity, we wouldn’t be able to describe pleasure and pain without inventing one. (Try it!).

So pleasure has a “what we should value” property in the sense that “should” is already defined in terms of pleasure. But at a more basic level, value just is pleasure in the way water just is H2O.

Since moral knowledge in this view is just a special kind of descriptive knowledge the subjective position seems to flow from the objective one in a relatively straightforward way.

This argument is a bit circular, but I think that’s hard to avoid in general re: qualia. Of course discussion of qualia in your OP is relevant.

Ben Dean 5 Apr 2022 13:37 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: Dismantling Hedonism-inspired Moral Realism
But Hewitt Rawlette’s theory is naturalist (“synthetic naturalism”).
It is extremely important that it be understood that I am not suggesting that our normative phenomenology represents some further realm of normativity, that it somehow acquaints us with normative properties that also exist detached from phenomenal experience, perhaps in actions or in non-mental states of affairs...
My proposal is that intrinsic goodness and badness just are felt qualities.
Emphasis in original. As she points out, arguments like Hare’s don’t really work against this kind of realism (“Hare’s dismissal of objective value...”) .

Ben Dean 9 Mar 2022 20:39 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Related: Impact Certificates