DPiepgrass

• DPiepgrassJul 24, 2025, 12:52 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Who’s hiring?

  I work for a small Canadian software company that needs a new C#/​TypeScript engineer. Everyone at the company normally works remote. IMO the software is not that interesting―typical Alberta software, water management for oil & gas―but our code is fairly well-factored, the frontend is pretty, and you could probably be paid to do some research into AI, and/​or integrate some sort of nonlinear/​MIP solver technology, or something involving hydraulic modeling.

  

  My employer doesn’t want to pay much more than the going rate for Alberta. That won’t seem great to Americans, but you might snag some equity, we are near an inflection point, and we expect to grow quickly (“small business” quickly, not “startup” quickly). Intellect is a must.

  Consider this job if you are strong in C# or TypeScript, you like remote, the pay is acceptable and you’d want to work with me personally (I wrote perhaps ~75% of the product).

  Who am I, then? I could say many things. I’m a rationalist EA who, in the past, wrote a Super Nintendo emulator, the MilliKeys keyboard for PalmPilots, the FastNav GPS system (with turn-by-turn directions, traffic-sensitive routing, etc.), and I used to build a set of open-source projects called “Loyc”. My personal page is at david.loyc.net. I am a writer with no audience and I will let you be the judge of whether this is because my writing is boring, or some other reason. YouTube must think I’m spicy, because they often censor me. Finally, I describe my approach to software here ― TL;DR: I value appropriately small code. After more than 4 years our core product―which serves three different submarkets―is about 125,000 lines of code excluding tests and blank lines. It would be less if I’d had full control of it, and 10,000 of those lines are comments ― ideally we’d have more. In my experience, many/​most devs would’ve used 500,000 lines for this.

  Our software stack includes .NET 8, EF Core, PostgreSQL, HiGHS (LP/​MIP solver), Leaflet, React 18, MobX, MUI, Chart.js, Docker, ansible, Traefik, Dart (oops) and Flutter, among other things. You don’t need skill in any of those, though you must be strong in C# or TypeScript, and I’m looking for multiparadigmatic competency ― e.g. you can switch between OOP and functional programming depending on what best fits the situation, or you have a knack for UX design, or something. Nice-to-haves include “vibe coding” skills (because I don’t know how), sysadmin/​prod/​Linux skills, strong communication skills (detail, precision, and accuracy without ambiguity) and open-source contributions you can use to demo your skills.

[Question] Who’s hiring?

• DPiepgrassJan 28, 2025, 1:46 PM

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Prepar­ing Effec­tive Altru­ism for an AI-Trans­formed World

  A key implication here is that we need models of how AI will transform the world with many qualitative and quantitative details. Individual EAs working in global health, for example, cannot be expected to broadly predict how the world will change.

  My view, having thought about this a fair bit, is that there is an extremely broad range of outcomes ranging from human extinction, to various dystopias, to utopia or “utopia”. But there are probably a lot of effects that are relatively predictable, especially in the near term.

  Of course, EAs in field X can think about how AI affects X. But this should work better after learning about whatever broad changes superforecasters (or whoever) can predict.

• DPiepgrassDec 7, 2024, 6:30 AM

  30 points

  4 ∶ 1

  on: dpiep­grass’s Shortform

  After following the Ukraine war closely for almost three years, I naturally also watch China’s potential for military expansionism. Whereas past leaders of China talked about “forceful if necessary” reunification with Taiwan, Xi Jinping seems like a much more aggressive person, one who would actually do it―especially since the U.S. is frankly showing so much weakness in Ukraine. I know this isn’t how EAs are used to thinking, but you have to start from the way dictators think. Xi, much like Putin, seems to idolize the excesses of his country’s communist past, and is a conservative gambler: that is, he will take a gamble if the odds seem enough in his favor. Putin badly miscomputed his odds in Ukraine, but Russia’s GDP and population were 1.843 trillion and 145 million, versus 17.8 trillion and 1.4 billion for China. At the same time, Taiwan is much less populous than Ukraine and its would-be defenders in the USA/​EU/​Japan are not as strong naval powers as China (yet would have to operate over a longer range). Last but not least, China is the factory of the world―if they should decide they want to do world domination military-style, they can probably do that fairly well while simultaneously selling us vital goods at suddenly-inflated prices.

  So when I hear China ramped up nuclear weapon production, I immediately think of it as a nod toward Taiwan. If we don’t want an invasion of Taiwan, what do we do? Liberals have a habit of magical thinking in military matters, talking of diplomacy, complaining about U.S. “war mongers”, and running protests with “No Nukes” signs. But the invasion of Taiwan has nothing to do with the U.S.; Xi simply *wants* Taiwan and has the power to take it. If he makes that decision, no words can stop him. So the Free World has no role to play here other than (1) to deter and (2) to optionally help out Taiwan if Xi invades anyway.

  Not all deterrents are military, of course; China and USA will surely do huge economic damage to each other if China invades, and that is a deterrent. But I think China has the upper hand here in ways the USA can’t match. On paper, USA has more military spending, but for practical purposes it is the underdog in a war for Taiwan^[1]. Moreover, President Xi surely noticed that all it took was a few comments from Putin about nuclear weapons to close off the possibility of a no-fly-zone in Ukraine, NATO troops on the ground, use of American weapons against Russian territory (for years), etc. So I think Xi can reasonably―and correctly―conclude that China wants Taiwan more than the USA wants to defend it. (To me at least, comments about how we can’t spend more than 4% of the defense budget on Ukraine “because we need to be ready to fight China” just shows how unserious the USA is about defending democracy.) Still, USA aiding Taiwan is certainly a risk for Jinping and I think we need to make that risk look as big and scary as possible.

  All this is to say that warfighting isn’t the point―who knows if Trump would even bother. The point is to create a credible deterrent as part of efforts to stop the Free World from shrinking even further. If war comes, maybe we fight, maybe we don’t. But war is more likely whenever dictators think they are stronger than their victims.

  I would like more EAs to think seriously about containment, democracy promotion and even epistemic defenses. For what good is it to make people more healthy and prosperous, if those people later end up in a dictatorship that conscripts them or their children to fight wars―including perhaps wars against democracies? (I’m thinking especially of India and the BJP party, here. And yes, it’s still good to help them despitee the risk, I’m just saying it’s not enough and we should have even broader horizons.)

  Granted, maybe we can’t do anything. Maybe there’s no tractable and cost-effective thing in this space. There are probably neglected things―like, when the Ukraine war first started, I thought Bryan Caplan’s “make desertion fast” idea was good, and I wish somebody had looked at counterpropaganda operations that could’ve made the concept work. Still, I would like EAs to understand some things.

  1. The risks of geopolitics have returned―basically, cold-war stuff.

  2. EAs overly focus on x-risk and s-risk over catastrophic risk. Technically, c-risk is way less bad than x-risk, but it doesn’t feel less bad. c-risk is more emotionally resonant for people, and risk management tasks probably overlap a lot between the two, so it’s probably easier to connect with policymakers over c-risk than x-risk.

  3. I haven’t heard EAs talk about “loss-of-influence” risk. One form of this would be AGI takeover: if AGIs are much faster, smarter and cheaper than us (whether they are controlled by humans or by themselves), a likely outcome is one in which normal humans have no control over what happens: either AGIs themselves or dictators with AGI armies make all the decisions. In this sense, it sure seems we are the hinge of history, as future humans may have no control, and past humans had an inadequate understanding of their world. But in this post I’m pointing to a more subtle loss of control, where the balance of power shifts toward dictatorships until they decide to invade democracies that are more and more distant from their sphere of influence. If global power shifts toward highly-censored strongman regimes, EAs’ influence could eventually wane to zero.

  1. ^

     just my opinion, but this video raises some of the key points

• DPiepgrassNov 6, 2024, 8:12 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: dpiep­grass’s Shortform

  I’ve been thinking that there is a “fallacious, yet reasonable as a default/​fallback” way to choose moral circles based on the Anthropic principle, which is closely related to my article “The Putin Fallacy―Let’s Try It Out”. It’s based on the idea that consciousness is “real” (part of the territory, not the map), in the same sense that quarks are real but cars are not. In this view, we say: P-zombies may be possible, but if consciousness is real (part of the territory), then by the Anthropic principle we are not P-Zombies, since P-zombies by definition do not have real experiences. (To look at it another way, P-Zombies are intelligences that do not concentrate qualia or valence, so in a solar system with P-zombies, something that experiences qualia is as likely to be found alongside one proton as any other, and there are about 10^20 times more protons in the sun as there are in the minds of everyone on Zombie Earth combined.) I also think that real qualia/​valence is the fundamental object of moral value (also reasonable IMO, for why should an object with no qualia and no valence have intrinsic worth?)

  By the Anthropic principle, it is reasonable to assume that whatever we happen to be is somewhat typical among beings that have qualia/​valence, and thus, among beings that have moral worth. By this reasoning, it is unlikely that the sum total |W| of all qualia/​valence in the world is dramatically larger than the sum total |H| of all qualia/​valence among humans, because if |W| >> |H|, you and I are unlikely to find ourselves in set H. I caution people that while reasonable, this view is necessarily uncertain and thus fallacious and morally hazardous if it is treated as a certainty. Yet if we are to allocate our resources in the absence of any scientific clarity about which animals have qualia/​valence, I think we should take this idea into consideration.

  P.S. given the election results, I hope more people are doing now the soul-searching we should’ve done in 2016. I proposed my intervention “Let’s Make the Truth Easier to Find” on EA Forum in March 2023. It’s necessarily a partial solution, but I’m very interested to know why EAs generally weren’t interested in it. I do encourage people to investigate for themselves why Mr. Post Truth himself has roughly the same popularity as the average Democrat―twice.

• DPiepgrassSep 29, 2024, 10:19 PM

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: DPiepgrass’s comment on: Con­soli­da­tion of EA crit­i­cism?

  Also: critical feedback can be good. Even if painful, it can help a person grow. But downvotes communicate nothing to a commenter except “f**k you”. So what are they good for? Text-based communication is already quite hard enough without them, and since this is a public forum I can’t even tell if it’s a fellow EA/​rat who is voting. Maybe it’s just some guy from SneerClub―but my amygdala cannot make such assumptions. Maybe there’s a trick to emotional regulation, but I’ve never seen EA/​rats work that one out, so I think the forum software shouldn’t help people push other people’s buttons.

• DPiepgrassSep 29, 2024, 9:43 PM

  19 points

  4 ∶ 0

  on: Con­soli­da­tion of EA crit­i­cism?

  I haven’t seen such a resource. It would be nice.

  My pet criticism of EA (forums) is that EAs seem a bit unkind, and that LWers seem a bit more unkind and often not very rationalist. I think I’m one of the most hardcore EA/​rationalists you’ll ever meet, but I often feel unwelcome when I dare to speak.

  Like:

  • I see somebody has a comment with −69 karma. An obvious outsider asking a question with some unfair assumptions about EA. Yes, it was brash and rude, but no one but me actually answered him.

  • I write an article (that is not critical of any EA ideas) and, after many revisions, ask for feedback. The first two people who come along downvote it, without giving any feedback. If you downvote an article with 104 points and leave, it means you dislike it or disagree. If you downvote an article with 4 points and leave, it means you dislike it, you want the algorithm to hide it from others, you want the author to feel bad, and you don’t want them to know why. If you are not aware that it makes people feel bad, you’re demonstrating my point.

  • I always say what I think is true and I always try to say it reasonably. But if it’s critical of something, I often get downvote instead of a disagree (often without comment).

  • I describe a pet idea that I’ve been working on for several years on LW (I built multiple web sites for it with hundreds of pages, published NuGet packages, the works). I think it works toward solving an important problem, but when I share it on LW the only people who comment say they don’t like it, and sound dismissive. To their credit, they do try to explain to me why they don’t like it, but they also downvote me, so I become far too distraught to try to figure out what they were trying to communicate.

  • I write a critical comment (hypocrisy on my part? Maybe, but it was in response to a critical article that simply assumes the worst interpretation of what a certain community leader said, and then spends many pages discussing the implications of the obvious trueness of that assumption.) This one is weird: I get voted down to −12 with no replies, then after a few hours it’s up to 16 or so. I understand this one―it was part of a battle between two factions of EA―but man that whole drama was scary. I guess that’s just reflective of Bay Area or American culture, but it’s scary! I don’t want scary!

  Look, I know I’m too thin-skinned. I was once unable to work for an entire day due to a single downvote (I asked my boss to take it from my vacation days). But wouldn’t you expect an altruist to be sensitive? So, I would like us to work on being nicer, or something. Now if you’ll excuse me… I don’t know I’ll get back into a working mood so I can get Friday’s work done by Monday.

• DPiepgrassSep 29, 2024, 8:01 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: GPT5 won’t be what kills us all

  Okay, not a friendly audience after all! You guys can’t say why you dislike it?

  Story of my life… silent haters everywhere.

  Sometimes I wonder, if Facebook groups had downvotes, would it be as bad, or worse? I mean, can EAs and rationalists muster half as much kindness as normal people for saying the kinds of things their ingroup normally says? It’s not like I came in here insisting alignment is easy actually.

• DPiepgrassSep 29, 2024, 7:57 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Søren Elverlin’s comment on: GPT5 won’t be what kills us all

  I only mentioned human consciousness to help describe an analogy; hope it wasn’t taken to say something about machine consciousness.

  I haven’t read Superintelligence but I expect it contains the standard stuff―outer and inner alignment, instrumental convergence etc. For the sake of easy reading, I lean into instrumental convergence without naming it, and leave the alignment problem implicit as a problem of machines that are “too much” like humans, because

  • I think AGI builders have enough common sense not to build paperclip maximizers

  • Misaligned AGIs―that seem superficially humanlike but end up acting drastically pathological when scaled to ASI―are harder to describe so instead I describe (by analogy) something similar: humans outside the usual distribution. I argue that psychopathy is absence of empathy, so when AGIs surpass human ability it’s way too easy to build in a machine like that. (Indeed, I could’ve said, even normal humans can easily turn off their empathy with monstrous results, see: Nazis, Mao’s CCP).

  I don’t incorporate Yudkowsky’s ideas because I found the List of Lethalities to be annoyingly incomplete and unconvincing, and I’m not aware of anything better (clear and complete) that he’s written. Let me know if you can point me to anything.

GPT5 won’t be what kills us all

• DPiepgrassAug 19, 2024, 7:07 PM

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Fo­rum up­date: 10 new fea­tures (Oct 2023)

  My feature request for EA Forum is the same as my feature request for every site: you should be able to search within a user (i.e. a user’s page should have a search box). This is easy to do technically; you just have to add the author’s name as one of the words in the search index.

  (Preferably do it in such a way that a normal post cannot do the same, e.g. you might put ”foo authored this post” in the index as @author:foo but if a normal post contains the text “@author:foo” then perhaps the index only ends up with @author (or author) and foo, while the full string is not in the index (or, if it is in the index, can only be found by searching with quotes a la Google: "@author:foo")

• DPiepgrassMay 6, 2024, 2:06 PM

  9 points

  4 ∶ 0

  in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Émile P. Tor­res’s his­tory of dishon­esty and harassment

  I didn’t see a message about kneecaps, or those other things you mentioned. Could you clarify? However, given Torres’ history of wanton dishonesty ― I mean, prior to reading this article I had already seen Torres lying about EA ― and their history of posting under multiple accounts to the same platform (including sock puppets), if I see an account harassing Torres like that, I would (1) report the offensive remark and (2) wonder if Torres themself controls that account.

• DPiepgrassApr 14, 2024, 3:20 AM

  10 points

  4 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Un­der­stand­ing FTX’s crimes

  Sorry if I sounded redundant. I’d always thought of “evaporative cooling of group beliefs” like “we start with a group with similar values/​goals/​beliefs; the least extreme members gradually get disengaged and leave; which cascades into a more extreme average that leads to others leaving”―very analogous to evaporation. I might’ve misunderstood, but SBF seemed to break the analogy by consistently being the most extreme, and actively and personally pushing others away (if, at times, accidentally). Edit: So… arguably one can still apply the evaporative cooling concept to FTX, but I don’t see it as an explanation of SBF himself.

• DPiepgrassApr 14, 2024, 1:27 AM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MathiasKB🔸’s comment on: Should the main text of the write-ups of Open Philan­thropy’s large grants be longer than 1 para­graph?

  What if, instead of releasing very long reports about decisions that were already made, there were a steady stream of small analyses on specific proposals, or even parts of proposals, to enlist others to aid error detection before each decision?

• DPiepgrassApr 14, 2024, 1:16 AM

  9 points

  3 ∶ 1

  in reply to: DPiepgrass’s comment on: Un­der­stand­ing FTX’s crimes

  You know what, I was reading Zvi’s musings on Going Infinite...

  Q: But it’s still illegal to mislead a bank about the purpose of a bank account.

  Michael Lewis: But nobody would have cared about it.

  He seems to not understand that this does not make it not a federal crime? That ‘we probably would not have otherwise gotten caught on this one’ is not a valid answer?

  Similarly, Lewis clearly thinks ‘the money was still there and eventually people got paid back’ should be some sort of defense for fraud. It isn’t, and it shouldn’t be.

  ...

  Nor was Sam a liar, in Lewis’s eyes. Michael Lewis continued to claim, on the Judging Sam podcast, that he could trust Sam completely. That Sam would never lie to him. True, Lewis said, Sam would not volunteer information and he would use exact words. But Sam’s exact words to Lewis, unlike the words he saw Sam constantly spewing to everyone else, could be trusted.

  It’s so weird. How can the same person write a book, and yet not have read it?

  And it occurred to me that all SBF had to do was find a few people who thought like Michael Lewis, and people like that don’t seem rare. I mean, don’t like 30% of Americans think that the election was stolen from Trump, or that the cases against Trump are a witch hunt, because Trump says so and my friends all agree he’s a good guy (and they seek out pep talks to support such thoughts)? Generally the EA community isn’t tricked this easily, but SBF was smarter than Trump and he only needed to find a handful of people willing to look the other way while trusting in his Brilliance and Goodness. And since he was smart (and overconfident) and did want to do good things, he needed no grand scheme to deceive people about that. He just needed people like Lewis who lacked a gag reflex at all the bad things he was doing.

  Before FTX I would’ve simply assumed other EAs had a “moral gag reflex” already. Afterward, I think we need more preaching about that (and more “punchy” ways to hammer home the importance of things like virtues, rules, reputation and conscientiousness, even or especially in utilitarianism/​consequentialism). Such preaching might not have affected SBF himself (since he cut so many corners in his thinking and listening), but someone in his orbit might have needed to hear it.

• DPiepgrassApr 13, 2024, 11:20 PM

  13 points

  4 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Un­der­stand­ing FTX’s crimes

  this almost confirms for me that FTX belongs on the list of ways EA and rationalist organizations can basically go insane in harmful ways,

  I was confused by this until I read more carefully. This link’s hypothesis is about people just trying to fit in―but SBF seemed not to try to fit in to his peer group! He engaged in a series of reckless and fraudulent behaviors that none of his peers seemed to want. From Going Infinite:

  He had not been able to let Modelbot rip the way he’d liked—because just about every other human being inside Alameda Research was doing whatever they could to stop him. “It was entirely within the realm of possibility that we could lose all our money in an hour,” said one. One hundred seventy million dollars that might otherwise go to effective altruism could simply go poof. [...]

  Tara argued heatedly with Sam until he caved and agreed to what she thought was a reasonable compromise: he could turn on Modelbot so long as he and at least one other person were present to watch it, but should turn it off if it started losing money. “I said, ‘Okay, I’m going home to go to sleep,’ and as soon as I left, Sam turned it on and fell asleep,” recalled Tara. From that moment the entire management team gave up on ever trusting Sam.

  Example from Matt Levine:

  There is an anecdote (which has been reported before) from the early days of Alameda Research, the crypto trading firm that Bankman-Fried started before his crypto exchange FTX, the firm whose trades with FTX customer money ultimately brought down the whole thing. At some point Alameda lost track of $4 million of investor money, and the rest of the management team was like “huh we should tell our investors that we lost their money,” and Bankman-Fried was like “nah it’s fine, we’ll probably find it again, let’s just tell them it’s still here.” The rest of the management team was horrified and quit in a huff, loudly telling the investors that Bankman-Fried was dishonest and reckless.

  It sounds like SBF drove away everyone who couldn’t stand his methods until only people who tolerated him were left. That’s a pretty different way of making an organization go insane.

  It doesn’t seem like this shouldn’t be an EA failure mode when the EA community is working well. Word should have gotten around about SBF’s shadiness and recklessness, leading to some kind of investigation before FTX reached the point of collapse. The first person I heard making the case against SBF post-collapse was an EA (Rob Wiblin?), but we were way too slow. Of course it has been pointed out that many people who worked with /​ invested in FTX were fooled as well, so what I wonder about is: why weren’t there any EA whistleblowers on the inside? Edit: was it that only four people plus SBF knew about FTX’s worst behaviors, and the chance of any given person whistle-blowing in a situation like that is under 25%ish? But certainly more people than that knew he was shady. Edit 2: I just saw important details on who knew what. P.S. I will never get used to the EA/​Rat tendency to downvote earnest comments, without leaving comments of their own...

• DPiepgrassMar 13, 2024, 11:12 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: What do XPT fore­casts tell us about AI risk?

  Superforecasters more than quadruple their extinction risk forecasts by 2100 if conditioned on AGI or TAI by 2070.

  • The data on this table is strange! Originally Superforecasters’ gave 0.38% for extinction by 2100 (though 0.088% for RS top quintile) but on this survey it’s 0.225%. Why? Also, somehow the first number has 3 digits of precision while the second number is “1%” which is maximally lacking in significant digits (like, if you were rounding off, 0.55% ends up as 1%).

  • The implied result is strange! How could participants’ AGI timelines possibly be so long? I notice ACX comments may explain this as a poor process of classifying people as “superforecasters” and/​or “experts”.

  I’d strongly like to see three other kinds of outcome analyzed in future tournaments, especially in the context of AI:

  1. Authoritarian takeover: how likely is it that events in the next few decades weaken the US/​EU and/​or strengthen China (or another dictatorship), eventually leading to world takeover by dictatorship(s)? How likely is it that AGIs either (i) bestow upon a few people or a single person (*cough*Sam Altman) dictatorial powers or (ii) strengthen the power of existing dictators, either in their own country and/​or by enabling territorial and/​or soft-power expansion?

  2. Dystopia: what’s the chance of some kind of AGI-induced hellscape in which life is worse for most people than today, with little chance of improvement? (This may overlap with other outcomes, of course)

  3. Permanent loss of control: fully autonomous ASIs (genius-level and smarter) would likely take control of the world, such that humans no longer have influence. If this happens and leads to catastrophe (or utopia, for that matter), then it’s arguably more important to estimate when loss of control occurs than when the catastrophe itself occurs (and in general it seems like “date of the point of no return on the path to X” is more important than “date of X”, though the concept is fuzzier). Besides, I am very skeptical of any human’s ability to predict what will happen after a loss of control event. I’m inclined to think of such an event almost like an event horizon, which is a second reason that forecasting the event itself is more important than forecasting the eventual outcome.

• DPiepgrassMar 13, 2024, 10:34 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: RomanHauksson’s comment on: What do XPT fore­casts tell us about AI risk?

  Replies to those comments mostly concur:

  (Replies to Jacob)

  (AdamB) I had almost exactly the same experience.

  (sclmlw) I’m sorry you didn’t get into the weeds of the tournament. My experience was that most of the best discussions came at later stages of the tournament. [...]

  (Replies to magic9mushroom)

  (Dogiv) I agree, unfortunately there was a lot of low effort participation, and a shocking number of really dumb answers, like putting the probability that something will happen by 2030 higher than the probability it will happen by 2050. In one memorable case a forecaster was answering the “number of future humans who will ever live” and put a number less than 100. I hope these people were filtered out and not included in the final results, but I don’t know.

  I also recommend taking a look at Damien Laird’s post-mortem.

  Damien and I were in the same group and he wrote it up much better than I could.

  FWIW I had AI extinction risk at 22% during the tournament and I would put it significantly higher now (probably in the 30s, though I haven’t built an actual model lately). Seeing the tournament results hardly affects my prediction at all. I think a lot of people in the tournament may have anchored on Ord’s estimate of 10% and Joe Carlsmith’s similar prediction, which were both mentioned in the question documentation, as the “doomer” opinion and didn’t want to go above it and be even crazier.

  > (Sergio) I don’t think we were on the same team (based on your AI extinction forecast), but I also encountered several instances of low-effort participation and answers which were as baffling as those you mention at the beginning (or worse). One of my resulting impressions was that the selection process for superforecasters had not been very strict.

• DPiepgrassMar 13, 2024, 9:29 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: A se­lec­tion of cross-cut­ting re­sults from the XPT

  This post wasn’t clear about how the college students were asked about extinction, but here’s a hypothesis: public predictions for “the year of human extinction at 2500” and “the number of future humans at 9 billion” are a result of normies hearing a question that mentions “extinction”, imagining an extinction scenario or three, guessing a year and simply giving that year as their answer (without having made any attempt to mentally create a probability distribution).

  I actually visited this page to learn about how the “persuasion” part of the tournament panned out, though, and I see nothing about that topic here. Guess I’ll check the post on AI next...

• DPiepgrassMar 5, 2024, 7:40 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Big List of Cause Can­di­dates: Jan­uary 2021–March 2022 update

  Apr 30 2022

  Is there a newer one? Didn’t find one with a quick search.

  This post focuses on higher level “cause areas”, not on lower-level “interventions”

  Okay, but what if my proposed intervention is a mixture of things? I think of it as a combination of public education, doing Google’s job for them (organizing the world’s information), promoting rationality/​epistemics/​empiricism, and reducing catastrophic risk (because popular false beliefs have exacerbated global warming, may destabilize the United States in the future, etc.)