DanielFilan

• DanielFilanSep 7, 2023, 11:02 PM

  13 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  Does the author have any personal relationship to any of their key sources? Any personal or professional conflicts of interest? Any personal agenda? Was their payment of money to anonymous sources appropriate and ethical?

  These seem like reasonable questions to ask. I whole-heartedly agree that such amateur journalists should only make payments that are appropriate and ethical—in fact, this strikes me as tautological.

• DanielFilanSep 7, 2023, 11:00 PM

  15 points

  6 ∶ 0

  in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  Did they ‘run it by legal’, in terms of checking for potential libel issues?

  If Ben wants to assume liability for libel lawsuits, I don’t see why he should be prevented from doing so. In the domain of professional investigative journalism, I can see why a company would have this standard, since the company may not want to be held liable for things an individual journalist rashly said, but that strikes me as inapplicable in this case.

  (Incidentally, it seems like this is probably a standard of professional investigative journalism that I don’t think amateur investigative journalism should attempt to adhere to)

• DanielFilanSep 7, 2023, 10:58 PM

  5 points

  4 ∶ 1

  in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  Did the author have any appropriate oversight, in terms of an editor ensuring that they were fair and balanced, or a fact-checking team that reached out independently to verify empirical claims, quotes, and background context?

  I think it’s fine to attempt to do these sorts of things yourself, as long as you don’t make serious errors, and as long as you correct errors that pop up along the way.

• DanielFilanSep 7, 2023, 10:55 PM

  8 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Geoffrey Miller’s comment on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  So, you don’t think amateur investigative journalism should even try to adhere to the standards of professional investigative journalism?

  That’s not what I said. I said “I think it’s fine to investigate something and write up your conclusions without having training as an investigative journalist” in response to the first thing you proposed as a way to evaluate the piece: “Does the author have any training, experience, or accountability as an investigative journalist, so they can avoid the most common pitfalls, in terms of journalist ethics, due diligence, appropriate degrees of skepticism about what sources say, etc?”

  I don’t know what the standards of professional investigative journalism are, so I’m unable to say whether amateur investigative journalism should try to adhere to them.

  [EDIT: I can say what I think about the standards you propose in replies to this comment]

• DanielFilanSep 7, 2023, 9:56 PM

  16 points

  16 ∶ 6

  in reply to: Geoffrey Miller’s comment on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  I disagree with that conclusion. For example, I think it’s fine to investigate something and write up your conclusions without having training as an investigative journalist, even if your conclusions make someone else look bad.

• DanielFilanSep 7, 2023, 8:37 PM

  25 points

  8 ∶ 0

  in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  I think the idea is that it was in a draft but got edited out last-minute? That seems to be corroborated by Ben’s comment.

• DanielFilanSep 7, 2023, 6:42 PM

  18 points

  8 ∶ 0

  in reply to: aprilsun’s comment on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  From another perspective, Ben has chosen to “search for negative information about the Nonlinear cofounders” and then—without inviting or even permitting the accused party to share their side of the story in advance—share it in a public space full of agents whose tendency to gossip is far stronger than their tendency to update in an appropriately Bayesian manner (i.e. human beings).

  I’m confused—wouldn’t you consider the “Conversation with Nonlinear” section to be letting the accused party share their side of the story in advance?

• DanielFilanAug 28, 2023, 12:16 AM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Select ex­am­ples of ad­verse se­lec­tion in longter­mist grantmaking

  My guess is that it’s this paper. The abstract/​introduction:

  If competitive equilibrium is defined as a situation in which prices are such that all arbitrage profits are eliminated, is it possible that a competitive economy always be in equilibrium? Clearly not, for then those who arbitrage make no (private) return from their (privately) costly activity. Hence the assumptions that all markets, including that for information, are always in equilibrium and always perfectly arbitraged are inconsistent when arbitrage is costly.

  We propose here a model in which there is an equilibrium degree of disequilibrium: prices reflect the information of informed individuals (arbitrageurs) but only partially, so that those who expend resources to obtain information do receive compensation. How informative the price system is depends on the number of individuals who are informed; but the number of individuals who are informed is itself an endogenous variable in the model.

  The model is the simplest one in which prices perform a well-articulated role in conveying information from the informed to the uninformed. When informed individuals observe information that the return to a security is going to be high, they bid its price up, and conversely when they observe information that the return is going to be low. Thus the price system makes publicly available the information obtained by informed individuals to the uniformed [sic]. In general, however, it does this imperfectly; this is perhaps lucky, for were it to do it perfectly, an equilibrium would not exist.

• DanielFilanAug 4, 2023, 12:35 AM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: quinn’s comment on: Ja­son’s Shortform

  They also paid for naming rights to various stadiums, I could imagine a similar thing with the Met (a gallery for FTX-traded NFTs?)

AXRP Epi­sode 24 - Su­per­al­ign­ment with Jan Leike

• DanielFilanJun 26, 2023, 6:49 PM

  7 points

  2 ∶ 16

  in reply to: JWS 🔸’s comment on: De­ci­sion-mak­ing and de­cen­tral­i­sa­tion in EA

  I wonder if “the CEA forum” would work? Low edit distance, gives the idea that it’s related to EA while not necessarily representing all of it. Downside is that it works less well if CEA changes their name.

• DanielFilanJun 26, 2023, 6:45 PM

  25 points

  12 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Joseph’s comment on: De­ci­sion-mak­ing and de­cen­tral­i­sa­tion in EA

  FYI to LW old-timers, “MoreRight” evokes the name of a neo-reactionary blog that grew out of the LW community. But I don’t think it’s a thing anymore?

• DanielFilanJun 23, 2023, 7:45 PM

  7 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: Cor­rectly Cal­ibrated Trust

  Things like getting funding, being highly upvoted on the forum, being on podcasts, being high status and being EA-branded are fuzzy and often poor proxies for trustworthiness and of relevant people’s views on the people, projects and organizations in question.

  To flesh this out a bit: I run an EA-adjacent podcast (the AI X-risk Research Podcast, tell your friends). I decide to have people on if, based on a potentially-shallow understanding of their work, I think it would be good if people understood their ideas better. Ways this can be true:

  1. I think the guest is right about some important things.

  2. The guest is prominent or influential, meaning that fleshing out their ideas and the justifications thereof might change various people’s minds.

  There’s also gating for whether or not the guest is too busy or doesn’t want to be on a podcast.

  At any rate, it doesn’t mean that I think the guest is right about the important things.

• DanielFilanJun 14, 2023, 10:32 PM

  11 points

  6 ∶ 1

  in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: What can su­per­in­tel­li­gent ANI tell us about su­per­in­tel­li­gent AGI?

  Note that if you take observations of tic-tac-toe superintelligent ANI (plays the way we know it would play, we can tie with it if we play first), then of AlphaZero chess, then of top go bots, and extrapolate out along the dimension of how rich the strategy space of the domain is (as per Eliezer’s comment), I think you get a different overall takeaway than the one in this post.

• DanielFilanJun 13, 2023, 6:50 PM

  31 points

  6 ∶ 0

  on: What can su­per­in­tel­li­gent ANI tell us about su­per­in­tel­li­gent AGI?

  The situation in go looks different:

  • New top-of-the-line go bots play different openings than we had in 2015, including ideas we thought were bad (e.g. early 3-3 invasions).

  • Humans have now adopted go bot opening sequences.

  That said:

  • Go bots are not literally omnipotent, there is a handicap level at which humans can beat them.

  • We can gain insight into go bot play by looking at readouts and thinking for ages.

  • It is possible for humans to beat top go bots in a fair fight…

    • … but the way that happened was by training an adversary go bot to specifically do that, and copying that adversary’s play style.

• DanielFilanJun 5, 2023, 6:54 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Holden Karnofsky’s comment on: Tak­ing a leave of ab­sence from Open Philan­thropy to work on AI safety

  This link works.

• DanielFilanMay 25, 2023, 9:42 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Holden Karnofsky’s comment on: Tak­ing a leave of ab­sence from Open Philan­thropy to work on AI safety

  For what it’s worth, I don’t see an option to buy a kindle version on Amazon—screenshot here

• DanielFilanApr 8, 2023, 6:15 PM

  9 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: richard_ngo’s comment on: Cri­tiques of promi­nent AI safety labs: Red­wood Research

  Seems like to the degree it’s valid, it’s actionable for people who might consider working with or funding Redwood.

• DanielFilanMar 16, 2023, 3:08 AM

  54 points

  21 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Time Ar­ti­cle Dis­cus­sion—“Effec­tive Altru­ist Lead­ers Were Re­peat­edly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Be­fore FTX Col­lapsed”

  Isn’t Caroline Ellison an obvious exception?

Pod­cast with EAG Bay Area participants