Fermi–Dirac Distribution

Karma: 1,373

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Dec 23, 2022, 8:52 PM
7 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: MaxDalton’s comment on: CEA’s work in 2022
As mentioned in that section, we clearly didn’t prioritise or eliminate this risk—we’re reflecting on how much that was a mistake, versus a good decision (to focus on other significant risks).
Hm, if you don’t mind the question — what are other significant risks you are thinking about? IMO, the FTX fraud scheme is a big deal if anything deserves to be called a big deal, from what I’ve read in the devastating legal documents about the situation, and given how SBF was framed as a poster child of EA and was a significant funder.
The only more significant risk I can think of is EA funding dangerous AI capabilities research via Anthropic, but that isn’t even unrelated to FTX (since FTX slash Alameda slash their leadership was Anthropic’s main funder). Also, my guess is that mitigating AI risk is not within the Community Health team’s scope.

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Dec 22, 2022, 3:11 AM
16 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Link-post for Caroline Ellison’s Guilty Plea
TL;DR provided by ABC News:
Ellison pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud on customers of FTX, wire fraud on customers of FTX, conspiracy to commit wire fraud on lenders of Alameda Research and wire fraud on lenders of Alameda Research, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, according to the court documents.
Together, the seven counts carry a maximum sentence of 110 years in prison.
Wang pleaded guilty to four counts: conspiracy to commit wire fraud on customers of FTX, wire fraud on customers of FTX, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud, the court documents stated. He faces up to 50 years in prison.

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Dec 17, 2022, 8:27 PM
13 points
7 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jeff Kaufman 🔸’s comment on: I’m less approving of the EA community now than before the FTX collapse
Did anyone else find the title of that post (“CEA Ops is now EV Ops”) a bit confusing?
When I first saw it, I thought, “oh, it seems like a team/sub-org within the CEA changed its name. Cool” and didn’t think much else about it. It didn’t strike me as important enough for me to click the title and read the post.
It was only months later, by reading an EA Forum comment in another post, that I noticed that CEA UK (the umbrella org) had changed its name to Effective Ventures. When I read the comment, I spent some time trying to find an official announcement, and it took me a while to realize that it was that post.
I’m confused about why that title was chosen over titles that made it clear that it was the CEA umbrella org that changed its name, rather than only a specific team within it.

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Dec 14, 2022, 4:46 AM
21 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Thoughts on legal concerns surrounding the FTX situation
Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said the following today:
To any person, entity or political campaign that has received stolen customer money, we ask that you work with us to return that money to the innocent victims.
I know almost nothing about law, so it’s unclear to me what this means, but it seems relevant to the topic of this post (and to EA in general), so I’m commenting this here in hopes that someone with more knowledge can shed some light.
What links here?
- The US Attorney for the SDNY asked that FTX money be returned to victims. What are the moral and legal consequences to EA? by Fermi–Dirac Distribution (Dec 14, 2022, 9:57 PM; 65 points)

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Dec 10, 2022, 9:37 PM
1 point
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: How Many Lives Does X-Risk Work Save On Average?
I could be wrong, but I think he meant to use “>” instead of “<”

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Dec 10, 2022, 9:35 PM
5 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: How Many Lives Does X-Risk Work Save On Average?
I want to point out something that I find confusing.
the expected number of lives saved from giving a bednet is infinite.
This can’t be true unless your credence that you’re killing an infinite number of lives by buying a bednet is exactly zero, right? Otherwise—if your credence is, say, $10^{- 10^{10^{10^{10^{10}}}}}$ -- then the expected number of lives saved is undefined. Am I thinking about this correctly?

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Dec 10, 2022, 8:30 PM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Evidence, cluelessness, and the long term—Hilary Greaves
when we assume the utility of an action can be modelled as a normal distribution, we are allowing for the possibility of negative and positive infinite utility. However, the expected value of the action is still finite (and equal to the mean of the distribution).
The first sentence here is not true. The formula below is the PDF of a normal distribution:
$f (x) = \frac{1}{σ \sqrt{2 π}} exp (- \frac{1}{2} {(\frac{x - μ}{σ})}^{2})$
The limit of $f (x)$ as $x$ approaches either $\infty$ or $- \infty$ is zero.
Moreover, if the first sentence I quoted from your comment were true, there would be no way for the second sentence to be true. This is the definition of expected utility:
$\sum_{o u t c o m e s} U (o u t c o m e) P (o u t c o m e)$
Where $U (o u t c o m e)$ is the utility of an outcome and $P (o u t c o m e)$ is its probability.
If you have an unbounded utility function, and you have any probability greater than zero (say, $10^{- 10^{10^{10}}}$ ) that the outcome of your action has infinitely positive utility, and a similarly nonzero probability (say, $10^{- 10^{10^{10^{10}}}}$ ) that it has infinitely negative utility, then the formula for expected utility simplifies to
$\infty \cdot 10^{- 10^{10^{10}}} - \infty \cdot 10^{- 10^{10^{10^{10}}}} = \infty - \infty$
which is undefined.

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Dec 10, 2022, 3:00 AM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Evidence, cluelessness, and the long term—Hilary Greaves
Also, if you’re biting the bullet on expectational total hedonistic utilitarianism, infinities will dominate everything, and you should ignore anything that doesn’t have infinite EV.
I think the problem is a bit worse than this?
If your decision procedure is “maximize the EV of an unbounded utility function,” you basically cannot make any decisions. After all, for any action you could take, there is an extremely low but still nonzero chance that the action is infinitely good, and a similarly low-but-nonzero chance that it is infinitely bad. Infinity minus infinity is undefined. So all actions have an undefined expected value.

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Dec 6, 2022, 11:25 PM
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: TW123’s comment on: Have your timelines changed as a result of ChatGPT?
text-davinci-003 (which is effectively ChatGPT)
This is probably a stupid question, but: do we actually know if ChatGPT uses text-davinci-003?
When I talk to ChatGPT with the Network tab of Chrome DevTools open, filter for the name “conversation,” and look at any request payload, I see that it has the key-value pair
model: “text-davinci-002-render”
Which seems to indicate that it might not be using text-davinci-003.

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Nov 21, 2022, 11:48 PM
52 points
11 ∶ 0
on: Review: What We Owe The Future
Here is my attempt at summarizing the main points:
In What We Owe the Future, MacAskill agrees with other longtermists about the moral importance of the long-term future, but disagrees with most of them about how best to affect it. Relative to other longtermists, MacAskill thinks that affecting societal values is more important and preventing AI-triggered extinction is less important. Also, MacAskill’s recommendations for how to influence the long-term future seem to have been researched less thoroughly than other parts of the book.

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Nov 17, 2022, 1:12 AM
20 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: RichardYannow’s comment on: Kelsey Piper’s recent interview of SBF
She disputes the “friend” claim, and says they’ve never had any communication in any platform she can find, other than the aforementioned interview.
The tweet you linked to appears to have been deleted.

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Nov 14, 2022, 10:54 PM
77 points
19 ∶ 2
on: In Defense of SBF
This article from The Wall Street Journal suggests that what happened was more like “taking funds from customers with full knowledge” than like a mistake:
In a video meeting with Alameda employees late Wednesday Hong Kong time, Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison said that she, Mr. Bankman-Fried and two other FTX executives, Nishad Singh and Gary Wang, were aware of the decision to send customer funds to Alameda, according to people familiar with the video.
(See also this article by The New York Times, which describes the same video meeting.^[1])
There are other signs of fraud. For example:
- Reuters reports that FTX had a “backdoor” which “allowed Bankman-Fried to execute commands that could alter the company’s financial records without alerting other people, including external auditors,” according to their sources.
- On November 10, the official FTX account on Twitter announced that FTX was ordered to facilitate Bahamian withdrawals by Bahamian regulators. Days later, the Securities Commission of the Bahamas claimed that that was a lie. As Scott Alexander put it, “this might have been a ruse to let insiders withdraw first without provoking suspicion.”
- FTX’s legal and compliance team resigned very early in this. As Matt Levine pointed out in one of his articles about the debacle (https://archive.ph/OER98), this probably means that they were not aware of what was going on.
- Prior to this, FTX and Alameda insisted that they were at “arm’s length” and that Alameda did not get preferential treatment at FTX. However, according to The New York Times’s sources, Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison “had been sitting within view of computers displaying [FTX]’s trading data,” despite Alameda being supposed to operate in a different office. Moreover, Mr. Bankman-Fried was also involved in Alameda, according to the NYT, “contributing to the decision-making on big trades.”
1. ^
  Key section:
  Meanwhile, at a meeting with Alameda employees on Wednesday, Ms. Ellison explained what had caused the collapse, according to a person familiar with the matter. Her voice shaking, she apologized, saying she had let the group down. Over recent months, she said, Alameda had taken out loans and used the money to make venture capital investments, among other expenditures.
  Around the time the crypto market crashed this spring, Ms. Ellison explained, lenders moved to recall those loans, the person familiar with the meeting said. But the funds that Alameda had spent were no longer easily available, so the company used FTX customer funds to make the payments. Besides her and Mr. Bankman-Fried, she said, two other people knew about the arrangement: Mr. Singh and Mr. Wang.

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Nov 13, 2022, 3:43 AM
15 points
0 ∶ 0
on: FTX will likely go bankrupt. What we know and some forecasts on what will happen next
On November 10, FTX announced that it was ordered to facilitate Bahamian withdrawals by Bahamian regulators. Well, today, the Securities Commission of the Bahamas claimed that that was a lie. (h/t bruce’s Shortform.)

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Nov 10, 2022, 11:15 PM
14 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Fermi–Dirac Distribution’s comment on: FTX will likely go bankrupt. What we know and some forecasts on what will happen next
Today, Bloomberg updated its estimate of SBF’s personal wealth:
As for Bankman-Fried’s personal net worth: Following FTX.US’s announcement about a potential trading halt, its value was reduced to $1 by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Bankman-Fried owns about 70% of the business, according to the index. It had been valued at $8 billion in a January fundraising round.
A 7.6% stake in Robinhood Markets Inc. was also removed from his wealth calculation, after Reuters reported that it was owned through Alameda and may have been used as collateral for loans.
As a result, Bankman-Fried now has no material assets tracked by the Bloomberg wealth index. At the start of this week, his fortune was $15.6 billion.

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Nov 10, 2022, 8:55 PM
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Community support given FTX situation
Yes, as was the part of Tyrone-Jay Barugh’s comment referencing the 90 day rule.

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Nov 10, 2022, 8:45 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Community support given FTX situation
See the first bullet point in this comment

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Nov 9, 2022, 9:48 PM
24 points
6 ∶ 2
on: FTX will likely go bankrupt. What we know and some forecasts on what will happen next
Matt Levine has a new article about this. Quoting from it:
The problem is that FTX took its customers’ money and traded it for a pile of magic beans, and now the beans are worthless and there’s a huge hole in the balance sheet
Notably, if this is true it seems to possibly be a bit at odds with some of SBF’s now-deleted tweets from Monday, in which he said that “FTX has enough to cover all client holdings. We don’t invest client assets (even in Treasuries).”

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Nov 8, 2022, 10:55 PM
19 points
2 ∶ 0
on: FTX will likely go bankrupt. What we know and some forecasts on what will happen next
Bloomberg now estimates that FTX and Alameda are both essentially worth $0, and that SBF is no longer a billionaire.
His remaining estimated wealth ($991 million) seems to mostly be based on his stake on FTX.us, which AFAICT has not been affected by today’s events. [ETA: also Robinhood stock.]

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Sep 30, 2022, 6:11 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: My Personal Story of Rejection from EA Global
Edited.

Fermi–Dirac Distribution Sep 30, 2022, 5:43 PM
10 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Matthew Yglesias’s comment on: My Personal Story of Rejection from EA Global
From my understanding, it is almost certainly not a question of money. They have the option of making admissions less competitive but increasing the ticket price and then having a competitive process for financial aid, but they do not think that that is a good option.
CEA’s concern with allowing a wider range of people into the conference seems to be that they’d take up the time of the people CEA most wants to be at an EAG.