Bluefalcon

Karma: 148

Bluefalcon 22 Jan 2022 18:29 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Bluefalcon’s comment on: Running for U.S. president as a high-impact career path
I’d also highlight this post for anyone with an interest in getting behind EA candidates. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FffuQRBYjvm5hiaFw/there-s-a-role-for-small-ea-donors-in-campaign-finance

Bluefalcon 22 Jan 2022 17:22 UTC
11 points
on: Running for U.S. president as a high-impact career path
There’s at least one EA running for Congress right now, and 80k has analyzed that as a potential career path. I think for the Presidency most of the same analysis would apply; just change the numbers. https://80000hours.org/2015/07/what-are-your-odds-of-getting-into-congress-if-you-try/
Also, the best analysis of political issues I’ve seen from an EA perspective is https://happinesspolitics.org/platform.html so you could use their issue weightings to do somewhat more in depth analysis than 80k did.

Bluefalcon 3 Jan 2022 7:34 UTC
2 points
on: EA/Rationalist Safety Nets: Promising, but Arduous
I have an objection to the idea (or at least some versions of it) that isn’t covered in the post. I don’t think my objection applies to advice/counseling/that sort of thing, but certainly does to money:
The process of building my own safety net, in itself, made me a lot more effective than I would have been otherwise. I went through some really rough times in my early career, including sleeping on a park bench for a month and seriously contemplating suicide after several rejections for jobs I was highly qualified for. To fix my situation, I had to confront some hard truths about how the world works, and about the limits of my ability to plan the future accurately, that I am not sure I ever would have confronted otherwise. I wound up in such extreme circumstances because I made risky career bets on independent projects, assumed they would work out and that those successes would lead to other successes that would solve all the problems created by not having a paying job or meaningful savings for several months while I pursued an independent project, and failed to contingency plan for either a failure of the project or for the project’s success to not immediately land me a paying job consistent with the skillset it demonstrated. I also had a bad tendency to blame all my failures on difficult circumstances or other people instead of thinking hard about what I could have done differently.
I have relatives in their 60s who still seem to think a deus ex machina will swoop in and rescue them from imprudent decisions as long as that’s what feels “fair” in that situation. I had definitely absorbed some of that attitude until confronted with the harsh reality that there was no one to rescue me except myself, and that I could do so only by making decisions with a clear eye toward their practical consequences and not based on my feelings about how the world “should” work. So I worry that in being the deus ex machina, even for extremely high EV people, you would risk reducing their EV by depriving them of an important skill-building opportunity.

Bluefalcon 6 Dec 2021 8:53 UTC
5 points
in reply to: casebash’s comment on: What are the most impactful roles that EAs are currently not entering (and why)?
I think the problem is that unethical people have an insurmountable competitive advantage in getting jobs as an ethicist. At least if these are academic roles, you have to publish to be a viable candidate, it’s a lot easier to say a new and false thing about ethics than a new and true thing, and reality won’t slap you in the face for being wrong the way it would in science. So you’d probably need to aim to be able to influence the hiring process somehow w/o being subject to the perverse incentives.

Bluefalcon 6 Dec 2021 8:43 UTC
−1 points
on: EA megaprojects continued
Megaprojects are generally poorly executed, over budget, and over time, so am I correct in taking the “megaproject” designation as really an anti-endorsement of all these activities?

Bluefalcon 6 Dec 2021 8:41 UTC
1 point
on: Want To Be An Expert? Build Deep Models
What are the sources for your examples? Particularly interested in Al Smith but I imagine other people might be interested in the others as well.

Bluefalcon 18 Sep 2021 23:25 UTC
1 point
on: Detailed tips on being helpful
Most of the suggested language sounds condescending and would piss me off if directed at me.

Bluefalcon 2 Sep 2021 6:47 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Governor Of California? (Scott Alexander: Astral Codex Ten)
I’ll give it a go: Predictit is illiquid and has roughly a 10% margin of error because of the transaction costs. 5% withdrawal fee (on the gross amount), plus 10% of any profits, plus of course the taxes you’d have to pay.
If I think Paffrath’s chance is actually 0, and he’s at 11, do I buy no on Paffrath for 89 cents? At most I’d win 11. Then I lose 6.1 on the fees. Then I lose ~1 on the taxes (and if I lose money instead, I can’t deduct it on my taxes). So for my 11 cents of nominal gain I only end up with 3.9. This is for keeping my money locked up for months in advance, when I might be able to make bigger profits elsewhere with the same amount of risk (this does imply predictions closer to the election would tend to be more accurate, since my opportunity cost of locking up the money is lower and it’s more worth making such a bet. But it’s also a lot harder for a prospective candidate to use this info). The $850 limit also limits how much money I can make, especially on a bet that is already rated as pretty likely to win, so if my time is sufficiently valuable that is also a consideration.
And, thinking about this in more detail, Predictit’s fee structure actually dis-incentivizes bidding down longshots more than bidding them up. If it has him at 11 and I think his chances are really 22, what happens if I buy the yes on Paffrath contract? My expected value without fees and taxes is 11 cents. But really there’s a bifurcated scenario. If I lose, I lose it all and, pay no fees. If I win, I pay 5% on my 100 cent withdrawal, plus 10% on my 89 cent winnings, for a total of 13.9. Plus taxes of ~19. So I keep roughly 56 cents out of my 89 cent winnings. So my real expected value is 63% of the gross expected value of the trade, vs. the only ~35% of gross expected value on the No bet. Further, my ability to get enough return to make it worth my time is higher. If I put $850 onto the No side at 89 cents, and I win, I get 850*100/89-850=~$105 in gross profits (of which I will then get to keep 35%). If I bet $850 on the yes side, and he actually wins, I get 850*100/11-850=~$7727. Even adjusting for my probability estimate only being 22%, I get $850 in expectation (of which I keep 63%). So my estimate of my true expected value of making the bet is $37 if I think the market has him rated 11 percentage points too high, or $536 if I think the market has him rated 11 percentage points too low.
This is very different than how e.g. the stock market works. There, the returns to being smarter than the market in either direction are symmetrical. If I think an $11 stock is really worth 22, I can buy it and make $11 (and assuming I meet the requirements, can get a margin loan from my broker and have an initial expense of only $5.5, then pay the rest when I sell the stock, so I make $11 on a $5.5 investment. Similarly, if I think an $11 stock is really worth 0, and I meet the brokerage’s requirements for margin trading, I can short sell as much as I want at the $11 price, by putting up a margin amount to cover my risk of loss (usually 50% of the value of the trade), then if I am right, buy the stock at $0 later to cover my trade. So If I short sell $11 of the stock and it goes to 0, my initial investment is $5.5 and I have made $11, the same as if I correctly predicted it was underpriced.
If Predictit has him at 20%, there’s at least a little something to that. But 10% has a high enough probability of being noise that I’d trust the conventional metrics over that.
Edited because some of my original example math made no sense in light of the actual mechanics of Predictit, and thinking through the mechanics added new insight.

Bluefalcon 16 Aug 2021 6:25 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Hazelfire’s comment on: What is the closest thing you know to EA that isn’t EA?
Strong endorse. Long before I came across EA as a movement I had adopted the philosophical foundations of it for religious reasons. Although the specific verses that struck me were not the ones about perfection, which sounds optional, but the greatest commandment, which sounds obligatory:
Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’This is the first and greatest commandment.And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’
Matthew 22:37-39. The first didn’t really sound actionable beyond state of mind because God doesn’t need anything, so the implication is that in practice all one’s effort needs to go into the second. And if you actually love your neighbor as yourself, you naturally think about effectiveness, not just intentions.

Bluefalcon 10 Aug 2021 6:06 UTC
12 points
in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians
the way you used it seems a lot more normal to me than the political usage

Bluefalcon 3 May 2021 8:16 UTC
0 points
on: The State of the World — and Why Monkeys are Smarter than You
I got 10 right and was only confident in 1 of my answers that I got wrong. The link I took it at said average is 40% right, which is way off the scores rosling got, so I do wonder if his study replicates. If he’s doing the normal thing and testing it all on students, I would expect them to be more pessimistic bc they are in that “everything sucks” phase of life as teenagers, and the media about the same because reporters have a particular bias toward negativity, because it’s what they feed on. In fact I am sufficiently confident about the negativity of reporters, both in terms of professional experience and the kind of person who is drawn to the job in the first place, that it makes me rather suspicious to find any group of people that does as poorly as them on the test, and teenagers hate everything is the only explanation I can come up with.

Bluefalcon 30 Mar 2021 3:50 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Alexis Carlier’s comment on: Law school vs MPP in Australia for those who have strong verbal skills but are weak at maths
Idk about Australia but in America politics is patronage-based and you’re not getting a political job without connections. You might get lucky and have those connections right out of school, through professors, work on a campaign, etc., or you might not. And if your boss leaves office you’re probably out of a job. So a lot depends on how long it takes you to get connections that have a job opening you want. Also, if you’re not in DC, your state capital, or some other policy hub (i.e. major cities where federal agencies have regional offices), your only route into policy may be running for office yourself, which requires being established in your community.
There is the civil service in theory but even that is political, just in a different way. You won’t get a civil service job without experience, and getting experience requires connections. But it’s less about having helped your Congressman get elected and more about knowing the DA’s cousin so you can get a job as an Assistant DA and then go to work as a fed in 5 years once you have the experience.

Bluefalcon 19 Mar 2021 23:02 UTC
11 points
in reply to: Garrison’s comment on: What Makes Outreach to Progressives Hard
I am not ideologically opposed to anything. I am opposed on empirical grounds to Marxism, and approximately indifferent between centrist democrats and what most Americans refer to as “socialism” on the merits. I am also empirically opposed to anyone referring to themself as a “socialist” in American politics, because it’s a bad tactic in the elections that actually affect people’s lives. Even in dem-supermajority legislatures, self-described socialists don’t make up enough of the caucus to be the deciding vote on an issue that has a clean left-right divide.
I voted Sanders in 2016 because my uneducated instinct is “progressive good” and because I thought Clinton a particularly weak candidate. Then I learned how bad his record is on immigration (well to the right of Joe Biden, for example), and have deeply regretted that vote ever since. EA has moved me somewhat toward the Dem establishment and away from the Left because it has given me the tools to prioritize effectively between issues I care about. Which was something I always knew I should be doing, but didn’t know how to do before. I always noticed a strain of America Only-ism in some quarters of the Left that I was uncomfortable with, but it’s complicated, because I didn’t know how to weigh that against, e.g. the Left not listening to idiots like Larry Summers on economic policy, or the different version of xenophobia that a lot of centrists espouse. And it turns out that the answer is that politicians have to be evaluated individually based on their support for the global poor and not based on ideology. On the merits, Bernie Sanders and Jamaal Bowman are pretty bad, Joe Biden meh but better than a Republican, AOC is pretty good, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker great . Republicans in the Trump era are consistently bad but someone like, idk, Lincoln Chaffee, might have been better than a lot of Dems in the 80s. And America Only-ism is definitely more common among self-described socialists than among people like Elizabeth Warren who are about as Left ideologically but don’t adopt the identity. And at least in my social circles it seems to be even more pronounced among activist types than among politicians.

Bluefalcon 19 Mar 2021 0:04 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Garrison’s comment on: What Makes Outreach to Progressives Hard
I am not sure there is value in winning over self-described socialists. There is certainly not if the intention is to get them involved in politics, but I suppose they could be valuable contributors in other career paths if they take a more rational approach to their career than their politics.
Assuming your values are broadly progressive, the net impact of self-declared socialists’ political participation is negative. DSA helped get five Congressional candidates elected in safe Dem seats, and nowhere else. Looking at Wikipedia’s list of current DSA members of Congress, the most conservative district any represents is Jamaal Bowman’s NY-16, with a Cook PVI of D+24 (meaning a Democrat typically gets 24 percentage points more here than the national average, and would win 74% to 26% in an evenly divided year.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Democratic_Socialists_of_America_members_who_have_held_office_in_the_United_States#United_States_House_of_Representatives. DSA national did not endorse a winning Congressional candidate in any swing district in 2018 or 2020. https://electoral.dsausa.org/past-endorsements/. I’m not going to go look through their locals’ endorsements but I’d bet $100 the same holds true there if anyone wants to do the research.
And their impacts when elected are bad. The Borgen Project, a nonprofit focused on advocating for the needs of the global poor, rated Eliot Engel one of the top 10 champions of the global poor in Congress. https://borgenproject.org/tag/eliot-engel/. Jamaal Bowman replaced him with a more isolationist, more nationalist foreign policy. AOC spends millions and millions of dollars that could go to winning a swing district seat on social media ads for herself in her safe Dem seat.
Sanders did not come close to winning the Democratic nomination. He had a temporary lead that was a quirk of the timing of various primaries. Biden wound up with 2.5x as many delegates as Sanders.

Bluefalcon 18 Mar 2021 13:33 UTC
8 points
on: Politics is far too meta
A lot of the ways that politicians deviate from public opinion have much less meta explanations than this Inadequate Equilibria hypothesis. On marijuana legalization, for example, a lot of politicians’ opposition is because police get massive overtime from the drug war, and therefore oppose legalization. Police unions tend to be major political players all the way up to the state level, and often the dominant one at the local level because there are a lot of police and if they vote as one then it’s a significant chunk of the total votes you need to get elected mayor or alderman. You don’t need some Keynesian beauty contest. Just normal special interest politics where a small group with a concentrated interest in an issue can matter more than a large group with a more diffuse interest, because the small group is more willing to change their votes based on it. Same basic structure to the problem of reducing police violence.
Or take something less partisan and less in the news: overfishing. Normally pro-environment coastal politicians generally support overfishing, very much against the recommendations of the Very Serious People, because fishermen are a sufficiently concentrated interest group to require courting, and of course their interest is in their income today, not some other person’s income in a generation. Attorneys general or other elected insurance regulators in coastal states will often take the added step of climate denialism specifically on the subject of anticipated coastal erosion, because coastal homeowners don’t want to pay a fair price for insurance or have their resale value lowered by an unfriendly prediction, and will vote out anyone who makes screws them on that. Again, none of this because the media thinks serious politicians have to do it, and if the media covers it at all they will usually agree that it’s wrong. But it’s all rational vote-seeking.

Bluefalcon 17 Mar 2021 23:44 UTC
−6 points
in reply to: Meadowlark’s comment on: What Makes Outreach to Progressives Hard
I disagree on socialism being a serious idea in American politics. It’s a thing left-wing trolls say to offend right-wingers. Any American who is serious about politics would never call themself a socialist as long as there is room to describe their ideas some other way, even if socialism might fit. Elizabeth Warren has a more left-wing voting record than Bernie Sanders. So you could argue she’s a socialist. But she doesn’t call herself a socialist, because she’s trying to actually get legislation done, and there are other ways to describe her beliefs.
I use the slur example not to be dismissive of social justice, but because it’s something a kid at Harvard can understand. No matter how privileged you are you’ve probably been called mean names at some point, and you can easily see how a racial slur is a worse extension of that. But that same Harvard kid, while thinking themself a dedicated anti-racist, will generally focus on instances like that over even domestic forms of inequality outside their understanding. I hear a lot of SJ talk about student loans, but not so much about the earned income tax credit, for example.

Bluefalcon 16 Mar 2021 12:06 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Cullen_OKeefe’s comment on: What Makes Outreach to Progressives Hard
I think it’s because they know women/poc/trans ppl/ppl on whatever fashionable domestic axis of inequality you want to look at, but don’t know anyone who lives in Burundi, and because the experience of oppressed people in America is still close enough to their own to actually empathize with. Lot easier to empathize with your friend who got called a slur than with someone dying of malaria in Africa. Both because they are your friend, and because you’ve probably been called mean names, maybe even by the same type of asshole tossing slurs at them, whereas deadly diseases that affect young healthy people are hard to even imagine.

Bluefalcon 27 Jan 2021 17:41 UTC
5 points
on: Being Inclusive
I don’t get this critique. Obviously if you are capable of a high-priority path you should take it, and it needs to be clear to people what those are. If you’re not, you do the next best thing. The point is to do the best YOU can do. Not some theoretical person that has your name but a completely different set of abilities. When I was a kid I wanted to be President. Now I am resigned to the fact that that will never happen, but I don’t feel excluded when a Presidential election is in the news day after day.
I also think it’s important to be honest with people about their probabilities of success. I could spend all my time running Vermin Supreme-style campaigns for President, because being President is the “best” thing, or I could make use of the more limited political talents I actually have and maybe over my career be pivotal in one or two changes to the law in my area of expertise by a) having an area of expertise, and b) being humble and developing good relationships with my Senators/Congressperson. But I have to understand the ways I fall short of the typical viable Presidential candidate in order to understand why the second option is better for me.

Bluefalcon 15 Sep 2020 7:45 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Judgement as a key need in EA
Good judgment is obviously broader than the narrow “forecasting” Tetlock is studying. But it seems to me that, other than high-level values questions (e.g. average vs aggregate utilitarianism) it all comes down to prediction skill in some sense, as a necessary consequence of consequentialism. If you can think of something that’s part of jood judgment and not either part of core values or of prediction in a broad sense I’d like to hear what specifically it is, because I can’t think of anything.

“Ultimately actions are good or based solely based on their consequences” necessarily implies your chosen actions will be better if you can predict outcomes better (all else being equal of course, especially your degree of adherence to the plan).

All this description of skills that are supposedly separate from forecasting , e.g.”picking the right questions”, “deciding which kinds of forecasting errors are more acceptable than others”, etc. sounds like a failure to rigorously think through what it means to be good at forecasting. Picking the right questions is just Fermi-izing applied at a higher level than the Superforecasters are doing it. “Picking the right kinds of errors” really seems to be about planning for robustness in the face of catastrophe, arguing against this sort of straw man expected value calculation that I don’t think an actually good forecaster would be naive enough to make.

Judgment is more about forecasting the consequences of your own actions/the actions you recommend to others, vs. the counterfactual where you/they don’t take the action, than computing a single probability for an event you’re not influencing. And you will never be able to calibrate it as well as you can calibrate Tetlockian forecasting because the thing you’re really interested in is the marginal change between the choice you made and the best other one you could have made, rather than a yes/no outcome. But it’s still forecasting.

Bluefalcon 6 Sep 2020 4:02 UTC
4 points
on: What is the best way to earn money outside your career?
You may have higher returns from investing in career advancement. I don’t have solid answers on any of this, but my best guess is my highest-value career investments have an annualized return of 60% (all numbers after inflation), while being an angel investor has a return of 35% (and unless you’re already rich/high income or work in finance, you’re limited to investing $2200/year in America), owning an AirBnB and paying someone else to do the work has a return of 22% (but this is wayyyyy higher than regular landlording, so I may not have properly priced in risks such as the pandemic), and investing broadly in the highest-risk, highest-reward sections of the stock market has an 11.4% return.

Figuring out how to invest money into your career may be tricky. The obvious example is education. But anything that provides skill-building or networking opportunities is potentially worth spending money on. And networking in particular I tend to think about more broadly than most people. Real networking comes mostly from working on shared projects, not going to conferences or whatever. So create those opportunities, and be willing to spend money to do it.

Edit: Returns on the stock market overall average 6.96%. I will consider any of the investments I have listed as circumstances warrant. Main thing to keep in mind is you get higher return, on average, by taking higher risk. But not stupid risks.