cole_haus

• cole_haus 12 Aug 2019 18:23 UTC

  2 points

  on: Key points from The Dead Hand, David E. Hoffman

  I’m a bit un­clear about this: it seems that this is true for dirty bombs, but it is ex­tremely hard to make a fis­sion bomb work.

  I’m far from an ex­pert, but Global Catas­trophic Risks makes it sound like that’s not the case:

  With mod­ern weapons-grade ura­nium, the back­ground neu­tron rate is so low that ter­ror­ists, if they have such ma­te­rial, would have a good chance of set­ting off a high­ yield ex­plo­sion sim­ply by drop­ping one half of the ma­te­rial onto the other half. Most peo­ple seem un­aware that if sep­a­rated HEU is at hand it’s a triv­ial job to set off a nu­clear ex­plo­sion … even a high school kid could make a bomb in short or­der.

  (the book is ac­tu­ally quot­ing Luis Al­varez there)

  A US gov­ern­ment spon­sored ex­per­i­ment in the 1960s sug­gests that sev­eral physics grad­u­ates with­out prior ex­pe­rience with nu­clear weapons and with ac­cess to only un­clas­sified in­for­ma­tion could de­sign a work­able im­plo­sion type bomb. The par­ti­ci­pants in the ex­per­i­ment pur­sued an im­plo­sion de­sign be­cause they de­cided a gun-type de­vice was too sim­ple and not enough of a challenge (Sto­ber, 2003).

Con­sumer prefer­ences for lab­grown and plant-based meat

• cole_haus 8 Aug 2019 17:53 UTC

  2 points

  on: An overview of ar­gu­ments for con­cern about automation

  I don’t re­ally have a co­her­ent the­sis in this re­sponse, just some thoughts/​refer­ences that came to mind:

  • I thought this re­cent pa­per was a pretty rea­son­able frame­work for think­ing about the high-level effects of au­toma­tion on la­bor.

  • Wage stag­na­tion: I thought Table 1 here was a pretty good overview of differ­ent stud­ies, their method­olo­gies and results

  • Wage stag­na­tion: I think the type of is­sue raised in GDP-B: Ac­count­ing for the Value of New and Free Goods in the Digi­tal Econ­omy is plau­si­bly an im­por­tant ad­di­tion to the dis­cus­sion. We know GDP has never been a great proxy for welfare and it’s plau­si­bly get­ting worse over time. Im­por­tantly, it sounds plau­si­ble that the growth of the digi­tal econ­omy will be cor­re­lated with au­toma­tion.

  • “it seems rea­son­able to worry about what might hap­pen should the con­di­tions that led to democ­racy no longer hold.” It also seems plau­si­ble to me that there’s path de­pen­dence/​hys­tere­sis such that democ­racy could per­sist even in the face of other con­di­tions. One story you could tell along those lines is that pop­u­la­tions in many coun­tries are now gen­er­ally older, wealthier, and more ed­u­cated.

  • On in­equal­ity and sta­bil­ity: Max We­ber’s crite­ria for fun­da­men­tal con­flict (from The­o­ret­i­cal So­ciol­ogy) are:

  (1) Mem­ber­ship in so­cial class (life chances in mar­kets and econ­omy), party (house of power or polity), and sta­tus groups (rights to pres­tige and honor) are cor­re­lated with each other; those high or low in one of these di­men­sions of strat­ifi­ca­tion are high and low in the other two.

  (2) High lev­els of dis­con­ti­nu­ity in the de­grees of in­equal­ity within so­cial hi­er­ar­chies built around class, party, and sta­tus; that is, there are large gaps be­tween those at high po­si­tions and those in mid­dle po­si­tions, with large differ­ences be­tween the lat­ter and those in lower po­si­tions with re­spect to class lo­ca­tion, ac­cess to power, and ca­pac­ity to com­mand re­spect. And,

  (3) low rates of mo­bil­ity up and, also, down these hi­er­ar­chies, thereby de­creas­ing chances for those low in the sys­tem of strat­ifi­ca­tion from bet­ter­ing their sta­tion in life.

  • Wan­ing demo­cratic in­fluence: Artists of the Pos­si­ble: Govern­ing Net­works and Amer­i­can Policy Change since 1945 sug­gests that di­rect demo­cratic in­fluence has always been limited.

• cole_haus 23 Jul 2019 7:44 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Ben_Kuhn's comment on: “Why Na­tions Fail” and the long-ter­mist view of global poverty

  Yes, I agree they’re very in­com­plete—as ad­ver­tised. I also think the origi­nal claims they’re re­spond­ing to are pretty in­com­plete.

  I.

  I agree that time hori­zons are finite. If you’re tak­ing that as mean­ing that the defect/​defect equil­ibrium reigns due to back­ward in­duc­tion on a fixed num­ber of games, that seems much too strong to me. Both em­piri­cally and the­o­ret­i­cally, co­op­er­a­tion be­comes much more plau­si­ble in iter­ated games.

  Does the sin­gle shot game that Ace­moglu and Robin­son im­plic­itly de­scribe re­ally seem like a bet­ter de­scrip­tion of the situ­a­tion to you? It seems very clear to me that it’s not a good fit. If I had to choose be­tween a sin­gle shot game and an iter­ated game as a model, I’d choose the iter­ated game ev­ery time (and maybe just set the dis­count rate more ag­gres­sively as needed—as the post points out, we can in­ter­pret the dis­count rate as hav­ing to do with the prob­a­bil­ity of de­po­si­tion).

  Maybe the crux here is the av­er­age tenure of au­to­crats and who we’re think­ing of when we use the term?

  II.

  (I don’t say “solve” any­where in the post so I think the quote marks there are a bit mis­lead­ing.)

  I agree that to come up with some­thing closer to a con­clu­sion, you’d have to do some­thing like an­a­lyze the weighted value of each of these struc­tural fac­tors. Even in the ab­sence of such an anal­y­sis, I think get­ting a ful­ler list of the struc­tural ad­van­tages and dis­ad­van­tages gets us closer to the truth than a one-sided list.

  Also, if we ac­cept the claim that Ace­moglu and Robin­son’s em­piri­cal ev­i­dence is weak, then the fact that I haven’t pre­sented any ev­i­dence on the real-world im­por­tance of these the­o­ret­i­cal mechanisms be­comes a bit less trou­bling. It means there’s some­thing closer to sym­me­try in the ab­sence of good ev­i­dence bear­ing on the rel­a­tive im­por­tance of struc­tural ad­van­tages and dis­ad­van­tages in each type of so­ciety.

  My in­tu­ition is that ma­jori­tar­ian tyran­nies and col­lec­tive ac­tion prob­lems are huge, per­va­sive prob­lems in the con­tem­po­rary world, but I won’t ar­gue for that here. I can pretty quickly come up with sev­eral ex­am­ples where it might be in an au­to­crat’s self-in­ter­est to con­front co­or­di­na­tion prob­lems and/​or ma­jori­tar­ian tyran­nies:

  • Re­duc­ing lo­cal air pol­lu­tion would im­prove an au­to­crat’s health

  • Re­duc­ing overuse of an­tibiotics in an­i­mal agri­cul­ture could re­duce their risk of con­tract­ing an an­tibiotic-re­sis­tant infection

  • Allow­ing/​en­courag­ing im­mi­gra­tion (for some au­to­cratic coun­try ap­peal­ing to im­mi­grants) could boost the econ­omy in a way that benefits the au­to­crat and leads them to over­rule the prefer­ences of locals

  Ob­vi­ously, each of these ex­am­ples is only the briefest sketch and way more work would have to be done to make things con­clu­sive.

• cole_haus 18 Jul 2019 22:44 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Larks's comment on: Age-Weighted Voting

  This pa­per has in­creased my gen­eral skep­ti­cism on the ac­cu­racy of any es­ti­mates of dis­count rates: Time Dis­count­ing and Time Prefer­ence: A Crit­i­cal Re­view. It has a table list­ing stud­ies that find dis­count rates rang­ing from −6% to ∞% .

• cole_haus 18 Jul 2019 22:39 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Sanjay's comment on: Age-Weighted Voting

  I’m not sure how much you thought about this as­pect, but I’ve re­cently be­come ex­tra wary of sur­veys on this topic (be­yond the or­di­nary skep­ti­cism I’d have for ques­tions which are mostly about ex­pres­sive prefer­ences and not re­vealed prefer­ences). Time Dis­count­ing and Time Prefer­ence: A Crit­i­cal Re­view has a table list­ing stud­ies that find dis­count rates rang­ing from −6% to ∞% . Even if that doesn’t in­fluence you as much as it did me, the pa­per has some good dis­cus­sion of differ­ent meth­ods of elic­i­ta­tion (which are es­pe­cially likely to in­fluence re­sults given the difficulty of the do­main).

• cole_haus 18 Jul 2019 19:11 UTC

  16 points

  on: “Why Na­tions Fail” and the long-ter­mist view of global poverty

  In ad­di­tion to the em­piri­cal prob­lems, I was very un­der­whelmed by the the­o­ret­i­cal mechanisms Ace­moglu and Robin­son out­line. I wrote up my com­plaints in a cou­ple of blog posts:

  • Au­to­crats can ac­cel­er­ate growth through co­op­er­a­tion: In­sti­tu­tions as a fun­da­men­tal cause of long-run growth claims that in­clu­sive so­cieties should, ce­teris paribus have greater eco­nomic growth than au­thor­i­tar­ian ones—in part, be­cause au­to­crats can’t cred­ibly com­mit to up­hold­ing prop­erty rights af­ter pro­duc­tive in­vest­ment has oc­curred. If we for­mal­ize this ar­gu­ment as a game, we see that the sin­gle shot case sup­ports this claim. But once we turn to the (more plau­si­ble) re­peated game, we see that mu­tual co­op­er­a­tion is an equil­ibrium.

  • In­clu­sive and ex­trac­tive so­cieties each have struc­tural ad­van­tages: Ace­moglu and Robin­son claim that ex­trac­tive so­cieties are at an eco­nomic dis­ad­van­tage be­cause elites will block eco­nomic im­prove­ments in the name of self-in­ter­ested sta­bil­ity. But ma­jori­ties in in­clu­sive so­cieties might also block eco­nomic im­prove­ments in the name of self-in­ter­est. Fur­ther­more, we might ex­pect in­clu­sive so­cieties to be more dis­ad­van­taged by prob­lems of col­lec­tive ac­tion.

  (Th­ese posts are still a bit drafty so apolo­gies for ty­pos, er­rors, etc.)

• cole_haus 16 Jul 2019 22:25 UTC

  3 points

  on: The Happy Cul­ture: A The­o­ret­i­cal, Meta-An­a­lytic, and Em­piri­cal Re­view of the Re­la­tion­ship Between Cul­ture and Wealth and Sub­jec­tive Well-Being

  Noth­ing es­pe­cially in­sight­ful to add. Just wanted to link to The French Un­hap­piness Puz­zle: The Cul­tural Di­men­sion of Hap­piness which is on a re­lated topic and rea­son­ably good.

Real­iz­ing the Mass Public Benefit of Ev­i­dence-Based Psy­cholog­i­cal Ther­a­pies: The IAPT Program

• cole_haus 11 Jul 2019 17:47 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Milan_Griffes's comment on: Do we know how many big as­ter­oids could im­pact Earth?

  No idea re­ally. The chap­ter re­ports “The best chance for dis­cov­ery of such [dark Damo­cloid] bod­ies would be through their ther­mal ra­di­a­tion around per­ihe­lion, us­ing in­frared in­stru­men­ta­tion on the ground (Rivkin et al., 2005) or in satel­lites.” Rivken et al. 2005 is here.

• cole_haus 10 Jul 2019 22:33 UTC

  8 points

  on: Do we know how many big as­ter­oids could im­pact Earth?

  Global Catas­trophic Risks (now slightly out­dated with a 2008 pub­li­ca­tion date) has a chap­ter on comets and as­ter­oids.

  It es­ti­mates that an im­pactor with a di­ame­ter of 1 or 2 kilo­me­ters would be “civ­i­liza­tion-dis­rupt­ing” and 10 kilo­me­ters would “have a good chance of caus­ing the ex­tinc­tion of the hu­man species”. So that’s what the “big” means in this con­text.

  We can es­ti­mate the pop­u­la­tion of pos­si­ble im­pactors via im­pact craters, telescopic searches and dy­nam­i­cal anal­y­sis. Us­ing these tech­niques, “[i]t is gen­er­ally thought that the to­tal pop­u­la­tion of near-Earth as­ter­oids over a kilo­me­tre across is about 1100.” But there are other classes of im­pactors with greater un­cer­tainty-comets and Damo­cloids. “Whether small, dark Damo­cloids, of, for ex­am­ple, 1 km di­ame­ter ex­ist in abun­dance is un­known—they are in essence undis­cov­er­able with cur­rent search pro­grammes.”

  This sounds like a plau­si­ble rec­on­cili­a­tion of the ap­par­ently con­flict­ing claims. OpenPhil is speci­fi­cally talk­ing about near-earth as­ter­oids where we do in­deed have fairly ac­cu­rate es­ti­mates. The NASA em­ployee refer­enced by MacAskill may be refer­ring to the larger class of all pos­si­ble im­pactors where un­cer­tainly is much greater.

• cole_haus 2 Jul 2019 0:35 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Larks's comment on: “Mo­ral Bias and Cor­rec­tive Prac­tices” and the pos­si­bil­ity of an on­go­ing moral catastrophe

  Yup, I agree that she draws strong con­clu­sions from weak ev­i­dence. I wish it were more care­ful, but I posted it any­way since this is re­ally the only anal­y­sis I have seen along these lines.

• cole_haus 24 Jun 2019 23:25 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Habryka's comment on: An­nounc­ing the launch of the Hap­pier Lives Institute

  Con­tem­po­rary Me­taethics delineates the field as be­ing about:

  (a) Mean­ing: what is the se­man­tic func­tion of moral dis­course? Is the func­tion of moral dis­course to state facts, or does it have some other non-fact-stat­ing role?

  (b) Me­ta­physics: do moral facts (or prop­er­ties) ex­ist? If so, what are they like? Are they iden­ti­cal or re­ducible to nat­u­ral facts (or prop­er­ties) or are they ir­re­ducible and sui generis?

  (c) Episte­mol­ogy and jus­tifi­ca­tion: is there such a thing as moral knowl­edge? How can we know whether our moral judge­ments are true or false? How can we ever jus­tify our claims to moral knowl­edge?

  (d) Phenomenol­ogy: how are moral qual­ities rep­re­sented in the ex­pe­rience of an agent mak­ing a moral judge­ment? Do they ap­pear to be ‘out there’ in the world?

  (e) Mo­ral psy­chol­ogy: what can we say about the mo­ti­va­tional state of some­one mak­ing a moral judge­ment? What sort of con­nec­tion is there be­tween mak­ing a moral judge­ment and be­ing mo­ti­vated to act as that judge­ment pre­scribes?

  (f) Ob­jec­tivity: can moral judge­ments re­ally be cor­rect or in­cor­rect? Can we work to­wards find­ing out the moral truth?

  It doesn’t quite seem to me like the origi­nal claim fits neatly into any of these cat­e­gories.

“Mo­ral Bias and Cor­rec­tive Prac­tices” and the pos­si­bil­ity of an on­go­ing moral catastrophe

Sum­mary of Cartwright and Hardie’s “Ev­i­dence-based Policy: A prac­ti­cal guide to do­ing it bet­ter”

• cole_haus 21 May 2019 18:41 UTC

  6 points

  on: EA Fo­rum: Foot­notes are live, and other updates

  Nice!

  Per­haps you all have con­sid­ered this already, but I think there’s a lot to like about side­notes over foot­notes, es­pe­cially on the web (e.g. foot­notes aren’t always in sight at the bot­tom of a phys­i­cal page).

• cole_haus 10 May 2019 22:02 UTC

  4 points

  on: Struc­ture EA or­ga­ni­za­tions as WSDNs?

  How would you ex­pect EA WSDNs to differ from cur­rent EA orgs con­cretely?

  When it comes to worker co­op­er­a­tives, I see the differ­ences as all flow­ing from re­duc­ing con­flict­ing in­ter­ests. That is, in stan­dard firms, own­ers are ul­ti­mately in­ter­ested in prof­its and only in­stru­men­tally in­ter­ested in work­ing con­di­tions while work­ers are ul­ti­mately in­ter­ested in work­ing con­di­tions (broadly con­strued) and only in­stru­men­tally in­ter­ested in prof­its. Worker co­op­er­a­tives re­solve this ten­sion by mak­ing agents prin­ci­pals and prin­ci­pals agents.

  This is an ideal­iza­tion, but it seems like the in­ter­ests of all rele­vant ac­tors in EA orgs (and non­prof­its more gen­er­ally?) are more al­igned. The board and the work­ers are (at least in the­ory) largely (if not solely) mo­ti­vated by the same do-good­ing goal.

• cole_haus 4 May 2019 4:10 UTC

  3 points

  on: What is the cur­rent best es­ti­mate of the cu­mu­la­tive elas­tic­ity of chicken?

  Con­sid­er­a­tion 1: Economists of­ten con­sider small ac­tors in com­pet­i­tive mar­kets to be price-tak­ers mean­ing that they can­not in­fluence prices on their own. This seems like a pretty plau­si­ble char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of any in­di­vi­d­ual food buyer.

  Con­sid­er­a­tion 2: “He rea­soned that eco­nomics says a drop in de­mand for some com­mod­ity should cause prices to fall for that com­mod­ity, and over­all con­sump­tion re­mains the same.” This is not cor­rect. In in­ward shift in the de­mand curve (“a drop in de­mand”) (for or­di­nary down­ward slop­ing de­mand curves and up­ward slop­ing sup­ply curves), causes both equil­ibrium price and quan­tity to de­crease. I’d guess the thing he’s try­ing to get at is that for a good which is unit elas­tic, a small drop in price is offset by a small in­crease in quan­tity which leads to to­tal rev­enue be­ing un­changed.

  So our first op­tion is to re­gard in­di­vi­d­ual ac­tors as too small to in­fluence the price. If we re­ject this and think they do have an effect, their effect would be to shift the de­mand curve in—drop­ping equil­ibrium price and quan­tity.

  Aside: I’m rea­son­ably well-in­formed about eco­nomics and don’t re­call hav­ing ever heard the term “cu­mu­la­tive elas­tic­ity” be­fore.

• cole_haus 24 Apr 2019 2:00 UTC

  7 points

  on: Why does EA use QALYs in­stead of ex­pe­rience sam­pling?

  I don’t re­ally see ESM as be­ing in op­po­si­tion to QALYs. It seems like it’s a method that you would use as an in­put in QALY weight de­ter­mi­na­tions. Wikipe­dia lists some of the cur­rent meth­ods for de­riv­ing QALY weights as:

  Time-trade-off (TTO): Re­spon­dents are asked to choose be­tween re­main­ing in a state of ill health for a pe­riod of time, or be­ing re­stored to perfect health but hav­ing a shorter life ex­pec­tancy.

  Stan­dard gam­ble (SG): Re­spon­dents are asked to choose be­tween re­main­ing in a state of ill health for a pe­riod of time, or choos­ing a med­i­cal in­ter­ven­tion which has a chance of ei­ther restor­ing them to perfect health, or kil­ling them.

  Vi­sual analogue scale (VAS): Re­spon­dents are asked to rate a state of ill health on a scale from 0 to 100, with 0 rep­re­sent­ing be­ing dead and 100 rep­re­sent­ing perfect health. This method has the ad­van­tage of be­ing the eas­iest to ask, but is the most sub­jec­tive.

  There’s also the “day re­con­struc­tion method” (DRM). The Oxford Hand­book of Hap­piness talks about ESM, DRM and oth­ers rele­vant mea­sure­ment ap­proaches at var­i­ous points.

  I’d guess the trou­ble with us­ing ESM, DRM and some other meth­ods like them for QALY weights is it’s hard to iso­late the causal effect of par­tic­u­lar con­di­tions us­ing these meth­ods.

• cole_haus 18 Apr 2019 23:29 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Robert_Wiblin's comment on: Thoughts on 80,000 Hours’ re­search that might help with job-search frustrations

  Ah, I see that now. Thanks.

  FWIW, I was speci­fi­cally look­ing for a dis­claimer and it didn’t quickly come to my at­ten­tion. It looks like a few other peo­ple in these sub­threads may have also missed the dis­claimer.