Ben Plaut

• Ben Plaut 14 Dec 2023 18:11 UTC

  6 points

  1 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Daystar Eld’s comment on: Non­lin­ear’s Ev­i­dence: De­bunk­ing False and Mislead­ing Claims

  Yeah I see your point. I think I personally have a stronger aversion to illegal requests from employers as a matter of a principle, even if the employee does that sort of thing anyway. But I can see how other people might view that differently.

  That said, in this particular case, it doesn’t seem like Chloe would otherwise be illegally buying weed?

• Ben Plaut 14 Dec 2023 16:13 UTC

  2 points

  1 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Daystar Eld’s comment on: Non­lin­ear’s Ev­i­dence: De­bunk­ing False and Mislead­ing Claims

  You make a fair point about the risk of admitting to such activities in a public setting. Although, if the statement is not true, there would be no risk in denying it, right? I’m hesitant to assume something is true in the absence of a denial, but I wanted to at least give Nonlinear an opportunity to deny it.

  This will vary between readers, but I personally find this more cruxy than perhaps you do. In my opinion: asking an employee to commit illegal acts, even with minimal social pressure, especially in a foreign country, especially if it happened multiple times, is a very serious concern. I can imagine extreme instances where it could be justified, but it doesn’t seem like that applies to this situation.

  I am also hoping that the accuracy of the weed allegation is much less ambiguous than some of the harder-to-pin down abuse claims (even if those might be worse in sum total if they were all true).

• Ben Plaut 13 Dec 2023 18:37 UTC

  72 points

  16 ∶ 2

  on: Non­lin­ear’s Ev­i­dence: De­bunk­ing False and Mislead­ing Claims

  Thank you for taking the time to write up all of this evidence, and I can only imagine how time-consuming and challenging this must have been.

  Apologies if I missed this, but I didn’t see a response to Chloe’s statement here that one of her tasks was to buy weed for Kat in countries where weed is illegal. This statement wasn’t in Ben’s original post, so I can see how you might have missed it in your response. But I would appreciate clarification on whether it is true that one of Chloe’s tasks was to buy weed in countries where weed is illegal.

• Ben Plaut 11 Dec 2023 1:58 UTC

  1 point

  1 ∶ 0

  on: So­phie’s Choice as a time trav­eler: a cri­tique of strong longter­mism and why we should fund more de­vel­op­ment.

  I really like this post. I totally agree that if x-risk mitigation gets credit for long-term effects, other areas should as well, and that global health & development likely has significantly positive long-term effects. In addition to the compounding total utility from compounding population growth, those people could also work on x-risk! Or they could work on GH&D, enabling even more people to work on x-risk or GH&D (or any other cause), and so on.

  One light critique: I didn’t find the theoretical infinity-related arguments convincing. There are a lot of mathematical tools for dealing with infinities and infinite sums that can sidestep these issues. For example, since ${\sum }_{t=1}^{\infty }f\left(t\right)$ is typically shorthand for ${lim}_{t\to \infty }{\sum }_{x=1}^{t}f\left(x\right)$, we can often compare two infinite sums by looking at the limit of the sum of differences, e.g., ${\sum }_{t=1}^{\infty }f\left(t\right)-{\sum }_{t=1}^{\infty }g\left(t\right)={lim}_{t\to \infty }{\sum }_{x=1}^t\left(f\right(x)-g(x\left)\right)$. Suppose $f\left(t\right),g\left(t\right)$ denote the total utility at time $t$ given actions 1 and 2, respectively, and $f\left(t\right)=2g\left(t\right)$. Then even though ${\sum }_{t=1}^{\infty }f\left(t\right)={\sum }_{t=1}^{\infty }g\left(t\right)=\infty$, we can still conclude that action 1 is better because ${lim}_{t\to \infty }{\sum }_{x=1}^t\left(f\right(x)-g(x\left)\right)={lim}_{t\to \infty }{\sum }_{x=1}^{t}g\left(t\right)=\infty$.

  This is a simplified example, but my main point is that you can always look at an infinite sum as the limit of well-defined finite sums. So I’m personally not too worried about the theoretical implications of infinite sums that produce “infinite utility”.

  P.S. I realize this comment is 1.5 years late lol but I just found this post!