I would personally recommend waiting to sell your kidney when there is a feasible jurisdiction you can travel to that allows kidney markets (e.g. Argentina under Milei).
DC
Karma: 1,717
I recommend asking clarifying questions to reduce confusion before confidently expressing what turn out to be at least in part, spurious criticisms. I guarantee you it’s not fun for the people announcing their cool new project to receive.
I feel a little alienation by the emphasis on elite education from both sides of this kind of debate. Not that there’s necessarily much that can be changed there, it’s probably just the nature of the game mostly. But I find a little odd that the “be more normal [with career capital]” camp presumes normal to include being in the upper middle class of the Anglo world. That’s usually the sort of person making the critique. Though I could see a blue-collar worker levying it too.
And? Do you have a particular solution to guarantee pandemic prevention that deals with the specific logistical complexities inherent to the task, that can be applied to every country on Earth without being resisted?
“Step 2: Draw the rest of the owl.”
I see you state your solutions will come in later posts but I think it’s better to do that upfront given your rhetoric is currently not justified. Given your title I expect to see a theory of change that attempts to address the overwhelming challenges involved.
It would be helpful to know what events have been hosted there by now.
“X-Risk” Movement-Building Considered Probably Harmful
My instinct has generally been for a while now that it’s probably really really bad for the majority of the population to be aware of the meme of x-risk, or at least more harm than good. See climate doomerism. See (attempted) gain of function research at Wuhan. See asteroid deflection techniques that are dual-use with respect to asteroid weaponization which is orders of magnitude worse of a still far-off risk than natural asteroid impact. See gain of function research at Anthropic which, idk, maybe it’s good but that’s kinda concerning, as well as all the other resources provided to questionably benevolent AGI companies under the assumption it will do good. “X-risk” seems like something that will make people go crazy in ways that will cause destruction, e.g. people use the term “pivotal act” even when I’d claim it’s been superceded by Critch’s “pivotal process”. I’m also worried about dark triad elites or bureaucrats co-opting these memes for unnecessary power and control, a take from the e/acc vein of thought that I find their most sympathetic position, because it’s probably correct when you think in the limit of social memetic momentum. Sorta relatedly, I’m worried about EA becoming a collection of high modernist midwittery as it mainstreams, watered down and unable to course correct from co-options and simplifications. Please message me if you want to riff on these topics.
Minor point that isn’t engaging with the substance of your post, which I basically agree with the main point, but a negative externality here is that fundraising is often annoying. There is adverse selection where organizations that fundraise are often corrupt (see: Wikipedia) and ineffective. If an org is fundraising, it makes me think implicitly, “Why do you need my money? What has caused you to have this scarcity? Are you ineffective and have been passed over?” Personally I’d prefer moving past the social technology of donations and move more towards impact market-like mechanisms.
one part of me is under the impression that more people should commit themselves to things that probably won’t work out but would pay off massively if they do. The relevant conflict here is this means losing optionality and taking yourself out of the game for other purposes. We need more wild visions of the future that may work out if e.g. AI doesn’t. Playing to your outs is very related but I’m thinking more generally we do in fact need more visions based on different epistemics about how the world is going, and someone might necessarily have to adopt some kind of provisional story of the world that will probably be wrong but is requisite to model any kind of payoff their commitment may have. Real change requires real commitment. Also, most ways to help look like particular bets towards building particular infrastructural upgrades, vs starting an AGI company that Solves Everything. On the flip side, we also need people holding onto their wealth and paying attention, ready to pounce on opportunities that may arise. And maybe you really should just get as close to the dynamo of technocapital acceleration as possible.
Not noticing big obvious problems with impact certificates/markets
What problems are you thinking of in particular?
Ancestor worship also came to mind a la What We Owe The Past, but I wasn’t sure if OP had something different in mind than that post.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ndvguMbcdAMXzTHJG/what-we-owe-the-past
What are specific examples of retrospectivism/retrospectivist causes that you have in mind? Are there things in this category that differ from global health and poverty causes? When you say reparations, what do you mean in particular? When would or wouldn’t reducing a global catastrophic risk such as pandemics count as helping one’s ancestors via the repair of their descendants?
People were probably just squicked by the shocking gunman example starting the first sentence with no context and auto-downvoted based on vibes, rather than your reasoning. You optimized pretty hard for violent shock value with your first sentence, which could be a good hook for a short story in other contexts but here hijacks the altruistic reader with ambiguously threatening information. I don’t personally mind but maybe it’s triggering for some. Try using less violent hypotheticals or more realistic ones, maybe
I disagree that there is some clear ontological distinction a priori between “legitimate medical use” and ‘abuse’/”stimulants wrecking his brain”. I do think different brain types respond to Adderall differently, with some being aggravated (bad fit) and some being calmed down and focused (‘real ADHD’), for instance. I am not an ADHD expert. But the idea that a doctor rubber-stamping a prescription is legitimate in kind from self-medication mostly strikes me as an invocation within social reality. Of course it helps to have professional guidance, often tremendously so, but they also screw things up too sometimes, and sometimes en masse e.g. with SSRIs. For someone like SBF, I could totally buy the hypothetical that he really benefitted from it and it also screwed up (or at least worsened pre-existing) decisionmaking processes. This is a contradiction in what sorts of beliefs we are allowed to hold both due to social norms and the structure of language, not a contradiction in the physical world where these drugs can have all sorts of positive and negative effects, where a real need for increased mental functionality could conceivably trade off against a simultaneous increase in the risk of making rash decisions. A genuinely concerned doctor could be on the lookout for that, but then if the user has the means they can just go to another doctor and get the drugs they want. Are people in severe pain addicted to painkillers?
I would only entertain the OP’s hypothesis as being the main cause if SBF was taking stimulants since childhood up to college days, with the drugs having had a significant shaping effect on his personality. I think it’s an interesting thing to explore further, but hard to disentangle correlation vs causation here. What seems more critical to me is the apparent sociopathic traits, but I am still quite confused about what exactly is going on with his neurodivergence. The Lewis book has been somewhat informative. He clearly does get some amount of addicted to certain types of fast-paced games with lots of uncertainty and evolving rules. I could certainly see stimulants increasing his addictivity and cognitive involvement in these decisionmaking ‘games’ at the cost of responsibility to factors outside the frame of his focus, but I’m not too sure as I could be typical-minding how dopaminergics influences different neurotypes.
Independent of aprilsun’s spat with Ryan, I am incredibly grateful they have dug up and linked SBF’s content on Felicifia. I had tried looking for it and failed, including asking people who I thought might know once or twice, and at least partly questioned whether it was an act of imagination on my part or someone else’s that he had posted on there. And the interaction where it seems like Ryan persuaded him of earn-to-give is fascinating as a historical matter (and much less importantly, quite the unilateral first strike to establish a sour internet argument).
but with venture capital, this equipment will never be inexpensive
Why do you believe this? How many VCs have you talked to about whether they’d be fine with the lower-cost version you want?
Have you looked into porting the concept of the public benefit corporation from the US to Germany?
Have you asked the grant organizations that you talked to for critical feedback and letting them know you’re fine with whatever they say? They would know more than this forum I’m guessing.
Why aren’t you trying to make money selling your MRI in rich countries first, then use profits to subsidize a cheaper version for poorer countries? If your product actually works and is good then I don’t see why it wouldn’t be a good product for everyone. You could consider selling to the US, German, or Ukraine militaries as likely customers to start.
My wild guess, based on limited info, at risk of overconfidence, since you asked for what might be the case, is that you have too idealistic a self-image that is preventing you from participating in the normal market processes that would create a positive and self-sustaining financial feedback loop that would allow you to finance sales to poorer countries. I would guess a priori that you should lean into being profit-driven and focus on establishing any demand at all for the product any way you can before offering it at cost or at a loss to poorer countries.
Do let me know if I am wrong in any way, don’t hesitate to correct me!
I’m reminded that I’m two years late on leaving an excorciating comment on the Longtermist Entrepreneurship Project postmortem. I have never been as angry at a post on here as I was at that one. I don’t even know where to begin.
Have you considered starting a public benefit corporation instead of a nonprofit?
humans tend to like super-rich and powerful people even after they become disgraced, that seems false based on informal evidence
I think you fail to empathize with aspects of the nature of power, particularly in that there is a certain fraction of humans who will find cachet in the edgy and criminal. I am not that surprised Lewis may have been unduly affected by being in Sam’s orbit and getting front-row seats to such a story. Though for all I know maybe he has accurate insider info, and Sam actually didn’t knowingly steal money. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I know of one that is less widely reported; not sure if they’re counted in the two Joseph Miller knows of that are less widely reported, or if separate.