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.
DanielFilan
Karma: 1,376
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?
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.
They also paid for naming rights to various stadiums, I could imagine a similar thing with the Met (a gallery for FTX-traded NFTs?)
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.
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?
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:
I think the guest is right about some important things.
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.
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.
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.
This link works.
For what it’s worth, I don’t see an option to buy a kindle version on Amazon—screenshot here
Seems like to the degree it’s valid, it’s actionable for people who might consider working with or funding Redwood.
Isn’t Caroline Ellison an obvious exception?
Re: the MIRI employees, it seems relevant that they’re “former” rather than current employees, given that you’d expect there to be more former than current employees, and former employees presumably don’t have MIRI as a major figure in their lives.
Probably some combination of Medlife Crisis videos and the blog debate between ACX and Compass Rose.
Supplements:
Creatine (in capsule form because I find the powder gross)
Freeze-dried mussel powder (contains B12, I don’t think mussels are sentient in the relevant way).
Vitamin D, altho I’m just going thru my stockpile and don’t think it’s actually useful to take.
Iron (I’m one of the people in EVN’s exploratory trial thing)
I should say: I haven’t actually noticed big differences from any of these, but I’m not convinced that I would notice them even if they were real and mattered.
Sources:
EVN’s stuff seems legit.
Back when I was getting into veganism I read VeganHealth.org, and it seemed like it was less propagandistic than e.g. NutritionFacts.org.
OK apparently Nicole is normally the head but the current head is Chana Messinger, who indeed has a STEM background. At any rate, I think it’s wrong to say that the whole community health team has a STEM background, but I guess that’s not the most important point for the discussion.
It looks like the head of CEA community health is Nicole Ross, whose LinkedIn lists a degree in philosophy, which I also wouldn’t consider a STEM subject.
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]