Denise_Melchin

• Denise_Melchin 11 May 2022 9:05 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: burner’s comment on: Ten­ta­tive Rea­sons You Might Be Un­der­rat­ing Hav­ing Kids

  Ah, when you said ‘significant amount’ I assumed you meant a lot more. 10% of the total does not seem like much to me.

• Denise_Melchin 10 May 2022 12:33 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Abby Hoskin’s comment on: Ten­ta­tive Rea­sons You Might Be Un­der­rat­ing Hav­ing Kids

  Sorry, I didn’t want to imply Caplan was making a more nuanced argument than you suggested! I do think he makes a much more nuanced argument than the OP suggests however.

  EAs seem generally receptive to resources like Emily Oster’s books, Brian Caplan’s book, or Scott Alexander’s Biodeterminist Guide (and its sequel), which all suggest to varying degrees that a significant amount of the toil of parenting can be forgone with near-zero cost.

  I think this is not only false, but also none of the authors claim this.

• Denise_Melchin 10 May 2022 8:56 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Richard Y Chappell’s comment on: Ten­ta­tive Rea­sons You Might Be Un­der­rat­ing Hav­ing Kids

  I am not excited. In my experience it is common for parents of young children to have a lot of ideas on this they are keen to implement but dial back on this as their kids get older. Implementing such ideas is a lot of work! You are not able to pursue a full-time career while fully homeschooling your kids. You would forfeit all the benefits of them growing bigger and needing you less. Also, my experience is that most parents realise that outdoing the traditional school system or alternatives with homeschooling is a much higher bar than they thought. This was definitely true for me. (My oldest is ~12.)

• Denise_Melchin 10 May 2022 8:50 UTC

  13 points

  on: Ten­ta­tive Rea­sons You Might Be Un­der­rat­ing Hav­ing Kids

  Paraphrasing Caplan without doublechecking his sources: the shared environmental effects on politics and religion are on political and religious labels, not necessarily on actions. So your kid might also call themselves a Christian, but does not actually go to church that much.

  I agree we shouldn’t discourage EAs from having kids too much for some of the reasons you mention, but I am not sure who you are arguing against? I think anti-kid sentiment used to be stronger in the early days of EA but I have not seen it around in years.

  Wanting to justify having children with a low chance that they are going to have a large impact later seems like a bad idea to me. It might hurt your relationship with them or worse, cause mental health issues. Have children if you want them, don’t have any if you don’t.

  As Abby has said, I don’t think a significant part of parenting toil can actually be foregone. To be fair, I don’t think Scott or Bryan Caplan actually claims that it can be! Caplan argues against ferrying your kids to lots of different after-school activities. But frankly, I don’t know any parent who does this in the first place.

  I am not able to comment on how having children has impacted my aspirations or productivity, as I had my first child before I encountered EA (or finished school, for that matter).

• Denise_Melchin 6 May 2022 14:20 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Julia_Wise’s comment on: Messy per­sonal stuff that af­fected my cause pri­ori­ti­za­tion (or: how I started to care about AI safety)

  That makes sense, thank you!

• Denise_Melchin 6 May 2022 9:41 UTC

  25 points

  on: Messy per­sonal stuff that af­fected my cause pri­ori­ti­za­tion (or: how I started to care about AI safety)

  Thank you for sharing!

  My concern about people and animals having net-negative lives has been related to what’s happening with my own depression. My concern is a lot stronger when I’m doing worse personally.

  I share the experience that my concern is stronger when I am in a worse mood but I am not sure I share your conclusion.

  My concern comes from an intuitive judgement when I am in a bad mood. When I am in a good mood it requires cognitive effort to remember how badly off many other people and animals are.

  I don’t want to deprioritise the worst off in favour of creating many happy lives in the future just because I have a very privileged life and “forget” how badly off others are.

• Denise_Melchin 21 Apr 2022 9:23 UTC

  6 points

  on: Why I am prob­a­bly not a longtermist

  This is a link collection for content relevant to my post published since, for ease of reference.

  Focusing on the empirical arguments to prioritise x-risks instead of philosophical ones (which I could not be more supportive of):

  1. Carl Shulman’s 80,000hours podcast on the common sense case for existential risk

  2. Scott Alexander writing about the terms long-termism and existential risks

  On the definition of existential risk (as I find Bostrom’s definition dubious):

  1. Linch asking how existential risk should be defined

  2. Based on this comment thread in a different question by Linch

  3. Zoe’s paper which also has other stuff I have not yet read in full

  How GCBRs could remain a solved problem, thereby getting us closer to existential security:

  1. A blogpost by Carl which cross-posted to the EA Forum later than it was published on the blog

• Denise_Melchin 21 Apr 2022 9:06 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: freedomandutility’s comment on: Free-spend­ing EA might be a big prob­lem for op­tics and epistemics

  You should keep in mind that high-earning positions enable a large amount of donations! Money is a lot more flexible in which cause you can deploy it to. In light of current salaries, one could even work on x-risks as a global poverty EtG strategy.

• Denise_Melchin 20 Apr 2022 8:24 UTC

  2 points

  on: Can we agree on a bet­ter name than ‘near-ter­mist’? “Not-longer­mist”? “Not-full-longter­mist”?

  I think neartermist is completely fine. I have no negative associations with the term, and suspect the only reason it sounds negative is because longtermism is predominant in the EA Community.

• Denise_Melchin 30 Dec 2021 17:46 UTC

  8 points

  on: Democratis­ing Risk—or how EA deals with critics

  Is there a non-PDF version of the paper available? (e.g. html)

  From skimming a couple of the argments seem to be the same I brought up here so I’d like to read the paper in full, but knowing myself I won’t have the patience to get through a 35 page pdf.

• Denise_Melchin 27 Sep 2021 18:14 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Why I am prob­a­bly not a longtermist

  I would be interested to read this!

• Denise_Melchin 27 Sep 2021 17:41 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: Denise_Melchin’s comment on: Why I am prob­a­bly not a longtermist

  This is just a note that I still intend to respond to a lot of comments, but I will be slow! (I went into labour as I was writing my previous batch of responses and am busy baby cuddling now.)

• Denise_Melchin 25 Sep 2021 10:12 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Mauricio’s comment on: Why I am prob­a­bly not a longtermist

  On your second bullet point what I would add to Carl’s and Ben’s posts you link to is that suffering is not the only type of disvalue or at least “nonvalue” (e.g. meaninglessness comes to mind). Framing this in Haidt’s moral foundations theory, suffering is only addressing the care/​harm foundation.

  Also, I absolutely value positive experiences! More so for making existing people happy, but also somewhat for creating happy people. I think I just prioritise it a bit less than the longtermists around me compared to avoiding misery.

  I will try to respond to the s-risk point elsewhere.

• Denise_Melchin 25 Sep 2021 8:47 UTC

  17 points

  on: Why I am prob­a­bly not a longtermist

  Thank you everyone for the many responses! I will address one point which came up in multiple comments here as a top-level comment, and otherwise respond to comments.

  Regarding the length of the long-term future: My main concern here is that it seems really hard to reach existential security (i.e. extinction risks falling to smaller and smaller levels), especially given that extinction risks have been rising in recent decades. If we do not reach existential security the future population is much smaller accordingly and gets less weight in my considerations. I take concerns around extinction risks seriously—but they are an argument against longtermism, not in favour of it. It just seems really weird to me to jump from ‘extinction risks are rising so much, we must prioritize them!’ to ‘there is lots of value in the long-term future’. The latter is only true if we manage to get rid of those extinction risks.

  The line about totalitarianism is not central for me. Oops. Clearly should not have opened the section with a reference to it.

  I think even with totalitarianism reaching existential security is really hard—the world would need to be permanently locked into a totalitarian state.

  I recommend reading this shortform discussion on reaching existential security.

  Something that stood out to me in that discussion (in a comment by Paul Christiano: “Stepping back, I think the key object-level questions are something like “Is there any way to build a civilization that is very stable?” and “Will people try?” It seems to me you should have a fairly high probability on “yes” to both questions.”)

  as well as Toby’s EAG Reconnect AMA is how much of the belief that we can reach existential security might be based on a higher level of baseline optimism than I have about humanity.

• Denise_Melchin 25 Sep 2021 7:37 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Jack Malde’s comment on: Why I am prob­a­bly not a longtermist

  Thanks for trying to summarise my views! This is helpful for me to see where I got the communication right and where I did not. I’ll edit your summary accordingly where you are off:

  1. You have person-affecting tendencies which make you unconcerned less concerned with reducing extinction risks than longtermists, although you are still concerned about the nearterm impacts and put at least some value on the loss of future generations (which also depends on how long/​big we can expect the future to be)

  2. You are suffering-focused [Edit: I would not have previously described my views that way, but I guess it is an accurate enough description]

  3. You don’t think humanity is very good now nor that it is likely to be in the future under a sort of ‘business as usual’ path, which makes you unenthusiastic want to prioritise about making the future good over making it long or big

  4. You don’t think the future will be long (unless we have totalitarianism) which reduces the scope for doing good by focusing on the future

  5. You’re sceptical clueless whether there are lock-in scenarios we can affect within the next few decades, and don’t think there is much point of trying to affect them beyond this time horizon

Why I am prob­a­bly not a longtermist

• Denise_Melchin 23 Sep 2021 8:54 UTC

  9 points

  on: UK’s new 10-year “Na­tional AI Strat­egy,” re­leased today

  Wow. I am still reading through this, but I am impressed with the quality input the UK government has clearly received and how well they wrote up their considerations and conclusions. Maybe this is normal for the reference class for UK gov strategy documents (if so I was unaware), but it is not something I was expecting.

• Denise_Melchin 21 Sep 2021 8:36 UTC

  12 points

  on: Does the Fo­rum Prize lead peo­ple to write more posts?

  More on that qualitative feedback: While people generally react quite positively to winning the prize, few people have explicitly told us it made them want to write more (even when we asked directly), and our surveys of the Forum’s userbase haven’t found many people saying that the chance of winning a prize leads them to invest more time in writing.

  Previously I think I responded that it did not motivate me to write more/​better, but in retrospect I think this is just false. At least to me, it feels very arrogant to be hopeful that I could win a prize and therefore encourages dishonesty with myself. I expect this to be similar for other people.

• Denise_Melchin 19 Sep 2021 16:38 UTC

  5 points

  on: Pan­demic pre­ven­tion in Ger­man par­ties’ fed­eral elec­tion platforms

  Thank you, this was really interesting! I voted already, mostly based on global aid, refugee, animal welfare and climate change considerations, but I would have wanted to look at pandemic considerations too if I had known a quick way to do it at the time. So I expect this to be a very helpful overview for others!

• Denise_Melchin 3 Sep 2021 8:44 UTC

  37 points

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Frank Feed­back Given To Very Ju­nior Researchers

  I agree with the gist of this comment, but just a brief note that you do not need to do direct work to be “part of the EA community”. Donating is good as well. :-)