Diego_Caleiro

Mo­ral Eco­nomics Concepts

• Diego_CaleiroJul 16, 2015, 4:51 AM

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  in reply to: impala’s comment on: In­tro­duc­ing Mo­ral Economics

  Robin Hanson is not mainstream in any sense I can envision, he did take a look at it though :) I asked an economist friend to review, and an economy student reviewed it as well. Check below for the link for the complete google docs if you are an economist who happens to be reading this.

• Diego_CaleiroJul 14, 2015, 7:03 PM

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  on: In­tro­duc­ing Mo­ral Economics

  If you are eager to see the other posts in the series, and would like to help them by commenting, feel free to comment in this google docs which contains all the posts in the series.

  The posts are already finished, yet, I highly encourage other EAs to create more posts in that document, or suggest changes. I’m not an economist, I was struck by this idea while writing my book on Altruism, and already spent many hours learning more economics to develop it. The goal is to have actual economists carrying this on to distances I cannot.

In­tro­duc­ing Mo­ral Economics

• Diego_CaleiroJun 24, 2015, 9:28 PM

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  in reply to: SydMartin’s comment on: Re­vamp­ing Ex­ist­ing Charities

  The question I would ask then is, if you want to influence larger organization, why not governmental organizations, which have the largest quantities of resources that can be flipped by one individual? If you get a technical position in a public policy related organization, you may be responsible for substantial changes in allocation of resources.

• Diego_CaleiroJun 24, 2015, 5:18 PM

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  in reply to: mhpage’s comment on: Re­vamp­ing Ex­ist­ing Charities

  At the end of the day, the metric will always be the same. If you can make the entire red cross more effective, it may be that each unit of your effort was worth it. But if you anticipate more and more donations going to EA recommended charities, then making them even more effective may be more powerful.

  See also DavidNash comment.

• Diego_CaleiroJun 24, 2015, 3:11 AM

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  on: Re­vamp­ing Ex­ist­ing Charities

  Except for the purposes of obtaining more epistemic information later on, the general agreement within the EA crowd is that one should invest the vast majority of eggs in one basket, the best basket.

  I just want to point out the exact same is the case here, where if someone wants to make a charity more effective, choosing oxfam or the red cross would be a terrible idea, but trying to make AMF, FHI, SCI etc more effective would be a great idea.

  Effective altruism is a winners take all kind of thing, where the goal is to make the best better, not to make anyone else be as good as the best.

• Diego_CaleiroJun 12, 2015, 7:41 PM

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  on: What Got Us Here Won’t Get Us There: Failure Modes on the Way to Global Cooperation

  This piece is a simplified version of an academic article Joao Fabiano and I are writing on the future of evolutionary forces, similar in spirit to this one. It will also be the basis of one of the early chapters of my book Altruism: past, present, propagation. We welcome criticism and suggestions of other forces/​constraints/​conventions that may be operating to interfere or accelerate the long term evolution of coalitions, cooperation, and global altruistic coordination.

What Got Us Here Won’t Get Us There: Failure Modes on the Way to Global Cooperation

• Diego_CaleiroJun 11, 2015, 12:18 AM

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  on: I am Nate Soares, AMA!

  1) I see a trend in the way new EAs concerned about the far future think about where to donate money that seems dangerous, it goes:

  I am an EA and care about impactfulness and neglectedness → Existential risk dominates my considerations → AI is the most important risk → Donate to MIRI.

  The last step frequently involves very little thought, it borders on a cached thought.

  How would you be conceiving of donating your X-risk money at the moment if MIRI did not exist? Which other researchers or organizations should be being scrutinized by donors who are X-risk concerned, and AI persuaded?

  What links here?

  • [Link] Nate Soares is an­swer­ing ques­tions about MIRI at the EA Forum by Rob Bensinger (LessWrong; Jun 11, 2015, 12:27 AM; 28 points)

• Diego_CaleiroJun 11, 2015, 12:09 AM

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  on: I am Nate Soares, AMA!

  1)Which are the implicit assumptions, within MIRI’s research agenda, of things that “currently we have absolutely no idea of how to do that, but we are taking this assumption for the time being, and hoping that in the future either a more practical version of this idea will be feasible, or that this version will be a guiding star for practical implementations”?

  I mean things like

  • UDT assumes it’s ok for an agent to have a policy ranging over all possible environments and environment histories

  • The notion of agent used by MIRI assumes to some extent that agents are functions, and that if you want to draw a line around the reference class of an agent, you draw it around all other entities executing that function.

  • The list of problems in which the MIRI papers need infinite computability is: X, Y, Z etc…

  • (something else)

  And so on

  2) How do these assumptions diverge from how FLI, FHI, or non-MIRI people publishing on the AGI 2014 book conceive of AGI research?

  3) Optional: Justify the differences in 2 and why MIRI is taking the path it is taking.

  What links here?

  • [Link] Nate Soares is an­swer­ing ques­tions about MIRI at the EA Forum by Rob Bensinger (LessWrong; Jun 11, 2015, 12:27 AM; 28 points)

• Diego_CaleiroJun 8, 2015, 9:16 PM

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  in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: We are liv­ing in a sub­op­ti­mal blogosphere

  These are very good points, I endorse checking John’s comments.

We are liv­ing in a sub­op­ti­mal blogosphere

[Dis­cus­sion] What have you found great value in not do­ing?

• Diego_CaleiroJun 6, 2015, 1:12 AM

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  on: [Dis­cus­sion] Are aca­demic pa­pers a ter­rible dis­cus­sion fo­rum for effec­tive al­tru­ists?

  Some additional related points:

  1) Joao Fabiano looked recently into acceptance likelihood for papers in the top 5 philosophical journals. It seems that 3-5% is a reasonable range. It is very hard to publish philosophy papers. It seems to be slightly harder to publish in the top philosophy journals than in Nature, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, or Science magazine, and this is after the filter of 6 positions available for 300 candidates that selects PHD candidates in philosophy (harder than Harvard medicine or economics).

  2) Bostrom arguably became very influential before Superintelligence within academia and the Lesswrong world. I have frequently found academics in the fields of Philosophy of mind, ethics, bioethics, physics, and even philosophy of language who knew his name and had some idea of who he was. Bostrom is a very prolific academic in terms of paper publication, and notably he pays attention to having an open website with his ideas available to the public. I believe his success prior to Superintelligence is explained, besides sheer brilliance, by actually displaying his ideas online as well as creating the World Transhumanist Organization and using techniques like talking about normal seeming topics (the matrix, cars on the other lane) in papers which are also strategies that helped make David Chalmers, another brilliant academic, become more prominent.

  3) Joao Fabiano’s inquire also found that David Lewis published, singlehandedly, 6.3% of top five journal publications. All women together published 3.6% (including Ruth Millikan, very prolific author). To me this indicates that the power law for publications is incredibly strong, with only extremely brilliant people like Lewis making the most substantial dents. The field is also male-skewed in an awkward way.

  4) For people who consider themselves intellectual potentials and intend to continue in academia, my suggestion is to create a table of contents for a book, and instead of going ahead and writing the chapters, find the closest equivalent of some chapter that could become a paper, and try to write a paper about that. If you get accepted, this develops your career, and allows you to be one of the stand-outs like Ord, MacAskill and Bostrom who will end up working in the top universities. If you continue to be systematically rejected, you can still get around by publishing books and being influential in the way say Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins became influential. Since I find this to be the optimal strategy I’m aware of at the moment, it is the one I’m taking.

  5) One behavior I found dangerous in the past is to “save your secret amazing idea from the world” protecting it by not testing it against other minds or putting it out for publication. Idea theft may be common in academia, but the response to that should be to simply have another better idea and carry on the work. Most ideas are too complex for non-authors to be able to steal. I think great value can come from publishing your ideas on Lesswrong (Stuart Armstrong does this) or Effective-altruism.com before transforming them into a paper, and eventually a book chapter. This is how I’ve been reasoning lately. (To put my money where my mouth is: if anyone wants to take a look at the table of contents of my academic Altruism: past, present, propagation book by the way I’m open to that, message me privately) I welcome any criticism of that blog--> Paper --> Chapter strategy.

  6) Most of what I said applies to philosophy and the humanities, and I’d be interested to know if people who published in STEM fields like Paul Christiano, Nate Soares, Benja Fallenstein, Scott Aaronson and Tegmark think this is a valuable alternative there as well.

• Diego_CaleiroMay 27, 2015, 10:35 PM

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  in reply to: zackrobinson’s comment on: Ques­tions about Effec­tive Altru­ism in academia (RAQ)

  More important than my field not being philosophy anymore (though I have two degrees in philosophy, and identify as a philosopher) the question you could have asked there is why would you want a philosophical audience to begin with? Seems to me there is more low hanging fruits in nearly any other area in terms of people who could become EAs. Philosophers have an easier time doing that, but attracting the top people in econ, literature, visual arts and others who may enjoy reading the occasional public science books is much less replaceable.

• Diego_CaleiroMay 27, 2015, 10:10 PM

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  in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: Ques­tions about Effec­tive Altru­ism in academia (RAQ)

  I’ve left the field of philosophy (where I was mostly so I could research what seemed interesting and not what the university wanted, as Chalmers puts it “studying the philosophy of x” where x is what interests me at any time) and am now in biological anthropology. It seems that being a professor in non-philosophy fields is much easier than in philosophy, from my many years researching the topic. Also switching fields between undergrad and grad school is easy, in case someone reading this does not know.

• Diego_CaleiroMay 27, 2015, 10:05 PM

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  in reply to: zdgroff’s comment on: Ques­tions about Effec­tive Altru­ism in academia (RAQ)

  Biological Anthropology, with an adviser whose latest book is in philosophy of mind, the next book on information theory, the previous book on—of all things—biological anthropology, and most of his career was as a semioticist and neuroscientist. My previous adviser was a physicist in the philosophy of physics who turned into a philosopher of mind. My main sources of inspiration are Bostrom and Russell, who defy field borders. So I’m basically studying whatever you convince me makes sense in the intersection of interestingly complex and useful for the world. Except for math, code and decision theory, which are not my comparative advantage, specially not among EAs.

• Diego_CaleiroMay 27, 2015, 6:00 PM

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  on: Ques­tions about Effec­tive Altru­ism in academia (RAQ)

  What are the unsolved problems related to infinite ethics that might be worth tackling as an academic? Some relevant writings on this topic to see what the field looks like

• Diego_CaleiroMay 27, 2015, 5:52 PM

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  on: Ques­tions about Effec­tive Altru­ism in academia (RAQ)

  I am not considering what Bostrom/​Grace/​Besinger/​ do philosophy strictu sensu in this question.

  After repleaceability considerations have been used at Ben Todd and Will Mac Askill’s theses at Oxford, and Nick Beckstead made the philosophical case for the far future, is there still large marginal return to be had on doing research on something that is philosophy strictu sensu?

  I ask this because my impression is that after Parfit, Singer, Unger, Ord, Mac Askill and Todd we have run out of efforts that have great consequential impacts in philosophical discourse. Not because improvements cannot be made, but because they would be minor in relation to using that time for other less strictu sensu endeavours.