Frank_R

• Frank_RMay 31, 2022, 1:42 PM

  6 points

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  in reply to: Question Mark’s comment on: Which pos­si­ble AI im­pacts should re­ceive the most ad­di­tional at­ten­tion?

  Other S-risks that may or may not sound more plausible are suffering simulations (maybe an AI comes to the conclusion that a good way to study humans is to simulate earth at the time of the Black Death) or suffering subroutines (maybe reinforcement learners that are able to suffer enable faster or more efficient algorithms).

• Frank_RApr 21, 2022, 9:55 AM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Vanessa’s comment on: Hiring a math­e­mat­i­cian to work on the learn­ing-the­o­retic AI al­ign­ment agenda

  I have noticed that there are two similar websites for mathematical jobs. www.mathjobs.org is operated by the American Mathematical Society and is mostly for positions at universities, although they list jobs at other research institutions, too. www.math-jobs.com redirects you to www.acad.jobs , which has a broader focus. They advertise also government and industry jobs and it is also for job offers in computer science and other academic disciplines.

  You have to register on both websites as an employer for several hundreds of dollars before you can post a job offer. I do not know if this is to much. Both sites are probably among the top ten for math related research positions, although this is only based on my gut feelings. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you if it is possible to post remote only jobs. I hope this information helps.

• Frank_RApr 20, 2022, 11:36 AM

  4 points

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  on: Hiring a math­e­mat­i­cian to work on the learn­ing-the­o­retic AI al­ign­ment agenda

  How much knowledge about AI alignment apart from the right mathematical background is necessary for this position? If the job is suitable for candidates without prior involvment in x-risks /​ longtermism /​ Effective Altruism, it may be a good idea to announce it at places as mathjobs.org.

• Frank_RMar 24, 2022, 8:22 AM

  4 points

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  in reply to: AndyMcKenzie’s comment on: Brain preser­va­tion to pre­vent in­vol­un­tary death: a pos­si­ble cause area

  I forgot to mention that you should be careful about how brain preservation increases or decreases the probability for suffering or existential risks. On the one hand, many patients waiting for whole brain emulation (WBE) could be a reason to push forward WBE without thinking about the possible negative effects deeply enough. On the other hand, if there are reasons to believe that some people alive today could live for millenia, this may ecourage longterm thinking. Since I cannot determine the sign of the risk, I am cautiously for brain preservation because of the positive nearterm effects.

• Frank_RMar 24, 2022, 7:50 AM

  4 points

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  in reply to: AndyMcKenzie’s comment on: Brain preser­va­tion to pre­vent in­vol­un­tary death: a pos­si­ble cause area

  I don’t disagree with you. Although I think that existential and global catastrophic risks are the most important cause area, there are good project ideas in the life extension community without easy access to venture capital. Since biological aging is a major source of suffering, life extension and brain preservation are worthwhile cause areas.

• Frank_RMar 23, 2022, 8:31 AM

  4 points

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  on: Brain preser­va­tion to pre­vent in­vol­un­tary death: a pos­si­ble cause area

  I have a few questions on the more practical side of brain preservation. Are there any organisations working on this problem with more room for funding? I know about the Brain Preservation Foundation and Nectome, but as an outsider it is hard to tell how active they are and what they could do with extra money.

  In my opinion, it is very difficult for a company offering brain preservation to hit the market. At the beginning, there are possibly only a few customers scattered throughout the world. You will probably need a standby team at the bed of the terminally ill patient to ensure high quality preservation. This will make the costs skyrocket. The optimal solution would be if a hospital offers brain preservation as a part of their service. However, this seems to be unlikely since the topic is rather controversial. Do you have thoughts about this problems?

• Frank_RMar 23, 2022, 8:13 AM

  3 points

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  in reply to: JackM’s comment on: A Fo­rum post can be short

  I think this discussion will become important in the future. On the one hand, I struggle a little bit to notice every post that is interesting for me. On the other hand, there is the danger that the EA movement starts to fragment if the forum is splitted. Longtermists could read only longtermist stuff, people interested in animal suffering read only posts on animal advocacy etc.

How the Ukraine con­flict may in­fluence spend­ing on longter­mist pro­jects

• Frank_RMar 14, 2022, 9:38 AM

  3 points

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  on: Let Rus­si­ans go abroad

  I agree strongly with what you have written. Especially, since in my opinion it is unlikely that there will be a liberal and/​or pro-western government in Russia, even if Putin will be replaced.

  Do you have any suggestion what an average person in a western country can do? Of course, you can write to your representative that the borders should be opened for Russian emigrants. Unfortunately, I do not know if this is really effective since politicians get probably tons of mail.

• Frank_RFeb 16, 2022, 1:09 PM

  19 points

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  in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Elon Musk donates $5.7 Billion, will work with Igor Kurganov [Cross­post]

  In my opinion “the most controversial billionaire” is either Peter Thiel or Donald Trump. Otherwise, I agree with what you have written.

• Frank_RFeb 16, 2022, 9:12 AM

  12 points

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  on: Cost Effec­tive­ness of Cli­mate Change Interventions

  Thank you for writing this post. I want to point out that your conclusions are highly dependent on your ethical and empirical assumptions. Here are some thoughts about what could change your conclusion:

  • If you donate to the top charities that are recommended by Founders Pledge, you can probably do much better than 30$/​ton. I have not been able to find the precise numbers quickly, but if I remember correctly, 1$/​ton is possible under reasonable assumptions. This would change your average estimate to $25,000 per life saved.

  • Let us assume that the maximal number of happy human beings that could live on earth is reduced by 1 billion by rising sea levels, loss of agricultural land area etc. Let us further assume that this consequences of global warming persist for 100,000 years and that there is a probability of 1% that no game-changing technology such as advanced geo-engineering will be developed. This would mean that 10^12 QALYs are lost and the effectiveness of a dollar would rise. Of course, this argument relies on your rate of temporal accounting.

  • Climate change could also increase other existential risks. For example, there could be a war about ressources that is fought by nuclear weapons, synthetic pathogens or malevolent AIs.

  The message I want to send is not that your analysis is wrong, but that evaluating longtermist interventions is a huge mess since different reasonable assumptions lead to wildly diverging answers.

• Frank_RDec 20, 2021, 8:46 AM

  2 points

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  on: Is Bit­coin Danger­ous?

  Thank you for writing this piece! I think that there should be a serious discussion if crypto is net positive or negative for the world.

  In my opinion, there are a few more ways how crypto could contribute to existential risk. Since you can accept donations in monero, it is much easier to make a living by spreading dangerous ideologies (human extinction is a worthy goal, political measures against existential risk are totalitarian, etc.) Of course, you can also support an atheist blogger in Iran or a whistleblower in China by crypto, but it is very hard to tell if the advantages or disadvantages weigh more.

  Moreover, crypto can be used to fund more dangerous stuff than “just” artificial pathogens. Think of AGIs that are build for a criminal purpose, imperfect mind uploads that suffer, or perfect mind uploads that are build with the intention to torture them, underground companies that avoid AI regulation in order to cut costs etc.

  These scenarios do not prove that cryptocurrencies are net negative; especially since it may be possible to build DAOs that will solve some coordination problems. Nevertheless, I would be happy if more smart people were thinking hard about these issues.

• Frank_RDec 18, 2021, 9:26 AM

  2 points

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  on: Why do you find the Repug­nant Con­clu­sion re­pug­nant?

  I suggest the following thought experiment. Imagine wild animal suffering can be solved. Then it would be possible to populate a square mile with millions of happy insects instead of a few happy human beings. If the repugnant conclusion was true, the best world would be populated with as many insects as possible and only a few human beings that take care that there is no wild animal suffering.

  Even more radical, the best thing to do would be to fill as much of the future light cone as possible with hedonium. Both scenarios do not match the moral intuitions of most people.

  If you believe in the opposite, namely that a world with fewer individuals with higher cognitive functions is more worthy, you may arrive at the conclusion that a world populated with a few planet-sized AIs is the best.

  As other people have said, all kinds of population ethics lead to some counter-intuitive conclusions. The most conservative solution is to aim for outcomes that are not bad according to many ethical theories.

• Frank_RNov 26, 2021, 4:09 AM

  6 points

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  in reply to: NunoSempere’s comment on: Is it no longer hard to get a di­rect work job?

  An important factor is how many people in the EA movement are actively searching for EA jobs and how many applications they write per year. Maybe this would be a good question for the next EA survey.

• Frank_RNov 16, 2021, 8:18 AM

  16 points

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  on: What’s the GiveDirectly of longter­mism & ex­is­ten­tial risk?

  Genomic mass screening of wastewater for unknown pathogens, as described here:

  [2108.02678] A Global Nucleic Acid Observatory for Biodefense and Planetary Health (arxiv.org)

  A few test sites can already help to detect a new (natural or manmade) pandemic at an early stage. Nevertheless, there is room for a few billion dollars if you want to build a global screening network.

  Unfortunately, I do not know if there is any organisation with need for funding working on this.

• Frank_RNov 15, 2021, 10:27 AM

  2 points

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  in reply to: bezurli’s comment on: Open Thread: Novem­ber 2021

  I agree with Linchs comment, but I want to mention a further point. Let us suppose that the well-being of all non-human animals between now and the death of the sun is the most important value. This idea can be justified since there are much more animals than humans.

  Let us suppose furthermore that the future of human civilization has no impact on the lives of animals in the far future. [I disagree with this point since it might be possible that future humans abolish wild animal suffering or in the bad case they take wild animals with them when they colonize the stars and thus extend wild animal suffering.] Nevertheless, let us assume that we cannot have any impact on animals in the far future.

  In my opinion, the most logical thing would be to focus on the things that we can change (x-risks, animal suffering today etc.) and to develop a stoic attitude towards the things we cannot change.

• Frank_RNov 8, 2021, 9:47 AM

  10 points

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  on: Frank_R’s Shortform

  There is a short piece on longtermism in Spiegel Online, which is probably the biggest news site in Germany:

  Longtermism: Was ist das—Rettung oder Gefahr? - Kolumne—DER SPIEGEL

  Google Translate:

  Longtermism: Was ist das—Rettung oder Gefahr? - Kolumne—DER SPIEGEL (www-spiegel-de.translate.goog)

  As far as I know, this is the first time that longtermism is mentioned in a mayor German news outlet. The author mentions some key ideas and acknowledges that shorttime thinking is a big problem in society, but he is rather critical of the longtermist movement. For example, he thinks that climate change is neglected within longtermism and he cites Phil Torres article on Aeon.

  I probably will not find the time to comment each of the points in the article and I do not know if this would be the most productive thing to do, but maybe some of you find the article interesting.

Frank_R’s Quick takes

• Frank_ROct 4, 2021, 2:15 PM

  4 points

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  on: Robin Han­son on the Long Reflection

  I think that it is not possible to delay technological progress if there are strong near-term and/​or egoistical reasons to accelerate the development of new technologies.

  As an example, let us assume that it is possible to stop biological aging within a timeframe of 100 years. Of course, you can argue that this is an irreversible change, which may or may not be good for humankinds longterm future. But I do not think that it is realistic to say “Let’s fund Alzheimer’s research and senolytics, but everything that prolongs life expectancy beyond 120 years will be forbidden for the next millenia until we have figured out if we want to have a society of ageless people.”

  On the other hand my argument does not rule out that it is possible to delay technologies which are very expensive to develop and which have no clear value from an egoistic point of view.

• Frank_RSep 25, 2021, 7:54 AM

  5 points

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  on: The prob­lem of ar­tifi­cial suffering

  I think that it is possible that whole brain emulation (WBE) will be developed before AGI and that there are s-risks associated with WBE. It seems to me that most people in the s-risk community work on AI risks.

  Do you know of any research that deals specifically with the prevention of s-risks from WBE? Since an emulated mind should resemble the original person, it should be difficult to tweak the code of the emulation such that extreme suffering is impossible. Although this may work for AGI, you need probably a different strategy for emulated minds.