I’m skeptical of metrics like “x% of people involved said they were satisfied” for estimating cost-effectiveness. Customer satisfaction doesn’t really connect very well to any of the things I care about; in most cases I’m happier with a rough estimate of lives saved/units of suffering prevented/QALYs purchased/etc. per dollar than with a more precise accounting of things that touch less directly on the end goal.
dirk
Karma: 196
dirk’s Quick takes
Thanks for including the fish-per-dollar estimate! I know it doesn’t account for the value of your speculative work, but having the number at all makes it a lot easier for me to reason about it.
(Also also, it isn’t only the poster who has to worry about the truth of what they say? It’s everyone? Comments also receive criticism all the time. I don’t think this poster/commenter divide cuts reality at the joints.)
(Also, I understand the comment was not phrased helpfully to you, but for my part I felt that it communicated the errors clearly enough that I could understand them easily, and appreciate having the false dichotomy especially pointed out without having to discover it myself).
Thank you for sharing, but I’ve read your post and am not convinced (either in this instance or in general). I think it was a fine comment to which you reacted with unwarranted negativity. Or, in short: no, you’re wrong.
I think if your arguments are locally invalid, that is something important about your post. High standards of accuracy and quality are something I value about Less Wrong and EA, and to me part of having high standards is trying to avoid even small mistakes.
Dunno if it’s still helpful, but https://www.highimpactprofessionals.org/talent-directory is a directory of EAs looking for work and contained several each of lawyers and accountants on a quick search.
I think speculating about what exactly constitutes the most good is perfectly on-topic. While ‘murdering meat-eaters’ is perhaps an overly direct phrasing (and of course under most ethical frameworks murder raises additional issues as compared to mere inaction or deprioritization), the question of whether the negative utility produced by one marginal person’s worth of factory farming outweighs the positive utility that person experiences—colloquially referred to as the meat-eater problem—is one that has been discussed here a number of times, and that I feel is quite relevant to the question of which interventions should be prioritized.
My main observation is that he and his people really do think the election was stolen from them.
That sounds to me like a reason not to elect him? Self-deceiving for personal gain (endemic though it is 😔) is not a positive trait for a president to have.
I don’t think illusionism is an accurate view, so I’d be opposed to adopting it.
If you don’t think their arguments are convincing, I consider it misleading to attempt to convince other people with those same arguments.
The claim that they can’t be moral patients doesn’t seem to me to be well-supported by the fact that their statements aren’t informative about their feelings. Can you explain how you think the latter implies the former?
Of course if we can’t ascertain their internal states we can’t reasonably condition our decisions on same, but that seems to me to be a different question from whether, if they have internal states, those are morally relevant.
I agree that LLM output doesn’t convey useful information about their internal states, but I’m not seeing the logical connection from inability to communicate with LLMs to it being fine to ignore their welfare (if they have the capacity for welfare); could you elaborate?
What makes eyewitness reports of UFOs more credible than eyewitness reports of miracles, which are if anything more frequent?
If you qualify as a Highly Sensitive Person, IMO it’s also worth considering whether you’re autistic; as far as I can tell, the two are synonyms.
You wrote that “No self-interested person is ever going to point this out because it pisses off the mods and CEA, who ultimately decide whose voices can be heard—collectively, they can quietly ban anyone from the forum / EAG without any evidence, oversight, or due process.” To me, this implies that you believe all self-interested people would refrain from pointing it out for the reason it upsets the mods, who can ban anyone without evidence or oversight. For it to be true that the mods’ capacity to ban people prevents self-interested people from posting on this topic, the mods would have to be likely to exercise that capacity with regards to this topic (well, or our hypothetical self-interested poster would have to mistakenly believe that they are).
That’s correct, yes; people will often use sockpuppet accounts to create the appearance of either popular support for their opinions or, in some cases, unfair criticism. (The term’s in common use most places I frequent, but as I discovered just now when looking up a reference, there’s also an entire Wikipedia page about the phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sock_puppet_account)
There was an attempt at that in rationalism, Dragon Army, though it didn’t ultimately succeed; you can find the postmortem at https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/dragon-army-retrospective-597faf182e50.