Halffull

Karma: 571

Halffull Jul 21, 2020, 5:56 PM
12 points
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on: What skill-building activities have helped your personal and professional development?
Going through several startup weekends showed me what works and what doesn’t when trying to de-risk new projects.

Halffull Jul 21, 2020, 2:27 AM
6 points
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on: Improving the future by influencing actors’ benevolence, intelligence, and power
This is great! Was trying to think through some of my own projects with this framework, and I realized I think there’s half of the equation missing, related to the memetic qualities of the tool.
1. How “symmetric” is the thing I’m trying to spread? How easy is it to use for a benevolent purpose compared to a malevolent one?
2. How memetic is the idea? How likely is it to spread from a benevolent actor to a malevolent one.
3. How contained is the group with which I’m sharing? Outside of the memetic factors of the idea itself, is the person or group I’m sharing with it likely to spread it, or keep it contained.
What links here?
- MichaelA🔸's comment on Improving the future by influencing actors’ benevolence, intelligence, and power by MichaelA🔸 (Jul 21, 2020, 11:54 PM; 2 points)

Halffull Jul 20, 2020, 6:25 PM
5 points
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in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Concern, and hope
Here’s Raymond Arnold on this strategy:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LxrpCKQPbdpSsitBy/short-circuiting-demon-threads-working-example

Halffull Jul 17, 2020, 12:36 AM
4 points
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on: A Step-by-Step Guide to Running Independent Projects
This is great!
I’d love to be able to provide an alternative model that can work as well, based on Saras Sarasvathy’s work on Effectuation.
In the effectuation model (which came from looking at the process of expert entrepreneuers), you don’t start with a project idea up front. Instead, you start with your resources, and the project evolves based on demand at any given time. I think this model is especially good for independent projects, where much of the goal is to get credibility, resources, and experience.
Instead of starting with the goal, you start with your resources: What are my skills, interests, connections, and resources? What can I do with them?
And then, instead of doing something like Murphyjitsu to check for risks , you might reach out to a few of the people who are in your network, tell them about vague ideas, and chat with them about it. They may help crystalize what the project is, and you can get them onboard to help. Now you’ve effectively derisked by splitting up the work of the MVP among multiple people. If you can’t get anyone to commit, that may be enough validation by itself to not continue.
Then, you may launch your MVP—not to validate doing the full project, but even to figure out what the full project is. By getting feedback on your MVP, seeing what people are excited about, and not, this can help crystallize the project even further.
Once you’ve gotten some momentum, you can write up, rather than a project proposal, a “project summary” showing your momentum so far and using that to get things like funding and clarify to yourself what has happened. Then, you can evaluate next steps.

Halffull Apr 23, 2020, 2:07 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Linda Linsefors’s comment on: The Case for Impact Purchase | Part 1
I happen to think that relative utility is very clustered at the tails, whereas expected value is more spread out.. This comes from intuitions from the startup world.
However, it’s important to note that I also have developed a motivation system that allows me to not find this discouraging! Once I started thinking of opportunities for doing good in expected value terms, and concrete examples of my contributions in absolute rather than relative terms, neither of these facts was upsetting or discouraging.
Some relevant articles:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2cWEWqkECHnqzsjDH/doing-good-is-as-good-as-it-ever-was
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/nassim-taleb-the-black-swan-author-in-praise-of-the-risk-takers-8672186.html
https://foreverjobless.com/ev-millionaires-math/
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10155299391129228

Halffull Apr 23, 2020, 2:01 AM
4 points
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in reply to: Linda Linsefors’s comment on: The Case for Impact Purchase | Part 1
But if it took on average 50 000 events for one such a key introduction to happen, then we might as well give up on having events. Or find a better way to do it. Otherwise we are just wasting everyone’s time.
But all the other events were impactful, just not compared to those one or two events. The goal of having all the events is to hopefully be one of the ¹⁄_50,000 that has ridiculous outsized impact—It’s high expected value even if comparatively all the other events have low impact. And again, that’s comparatively. Compared to say, most other events, an event on AI safety is ridiculously high impact.
It can’t take more that ~50 events for every AI Safety researcher to get to know each other.
This is true, much of the networking impact of events is frontloaded.

Halffull Apr 23, 2020, 1:20 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Linda Linsefors’s comment on: The Case for Impact Purchase | Part 1
Nope, ¹⁄_50,000 seems like a realistic ratio for very high impact events to normal impact events.

Halffull Apr 20, 2020, 9:05 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Linda Linsefors’s comment on: The Case for Impact Purchase | Part 1
Would you say that events are low impact?
I think most events will be comparatively low impact compared to the highest impact events. Let’s say you have 100,000 AI safety events. I think most of them will be comparatively low impact, but one in particular ends up creating the seed of a key idea in AI safety, another ends up introducing a key pair of researchers that go on to do great things together.
Now, if I want to pay those two highest impact events their relative money related to all the other events, I have a few options:
1. Pay all of the events based on their expected impact prior to the events, so the money evens out.
2. Pay a very small amount of money to the other events, so I can afford to pay the two events that had many orders of magnitude higher impact.
3. Only buy a small fraction of the impact of the very high impact events, so I have money left over to pay the small events and can reward them all on impact equally.

Halffull Apr 18, 2020, 11:09 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Linda Linsefors’s comment on: The Case for Impact Purchase | Part 1
Since there will limited amount of money, what is your motivation for giving the low impact projects anything at all?
I’m not sure. The vibe I got from the original post was that it would be good to have small rewards for small impact projects?
I think the high impact projects are often very risky, and will most likely have low impact. Perhaps it makes sense to compensate people for taking the hit for society so that ¹⁄_1,000,000 of the people who start such projects can have high impact?

Halffull Apr 16, 2020, 10:08 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Linda Linsefors’s comment on: The Case for Impact Purchase | Part 1
For an impact purchase the amount of money is decided based on how good impact of the project was
I’m curious about how exactly this would work. My prior is that impact is clustered at the tails.
This means that there will frequently be small impact projects, and very occasionally be large impact projects—My guess is that if you want to be able to incentivize the frequent small
impact projects at all, you won’t be able to afford the large impact projects, because they are many magnitudes of impact larger. You could just purchase part of their impact, but in practice this means that there’s a cap on how much you can receive from impact purchase.
Maybe a cap is fine, and you know that all you’re ever get from an impact purchase is for instance $50,000, and the prestige comes with what % of impact they bought at that price.

Halffull Apr 2, 2020, 9:54 PM
3 points
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in reply to: alex lawsen’s comment on: New Top EA Causes for 2020?
Perhaps Dereke Bruce had the right of it here:
“In order to keep a true perspective of one’s importance, everyone should have a dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him.”

Halffull Apr 1, 2020, 2:48 PM
28 points
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on: New Top EA Causes for 2020?
I propose that the best thing we can do for the long term future is to create positive flow-through effects now. Specifically, if we increase people’s overall sense of well-being and altruistic tendencies, this will lead to more altruistic policies and organizations, which will lead to a better future.
Therefore, I propose a new top EA cause for 2020: Distributing Puppies
- Puppies decrease individual loneliness, allowing a more global worldview.
- Puppies model unconditional love and altruism, creating a flowthrough to their owners.
- Puppies with good owners on their own are just sources of positive utility, increasing global welfare.
What links here?
- Gidi Kadosh's comment on Announcing “Naming What We Can”! by Gidi Kadosh (Apr 3, 2021, 12:18 PM; 67 points)

Halffull Mar 30, 2020, 9:01 PM
5 points
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on: What are EA project ideas you have?
You might be interested in this same question that was asked last June:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NQR5x3rEQrgQHeevm/what-new-ea-project-or-org-would-you-like-to-see-created-in

Halffull Mar 28, 2020, 1:48 AM
3 points
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on: Halffull’s Shortform
Something else in the vein of “things EAs and rationalists should be paying attention to in regards to Corona.”
There’s a common failure mode in large human systems where one outlier causes us to create a rule that is a worse equilibrium. In the PersonalMBA, Josh Kaufman talks about someone taking advantage of a “buy any book you want” rule that a company has—so you make it so that you can no longer get any free books.
This same pattern has happened before in the US, after 9-11 - We created a whole bunch of security theater, that caused more suffering for everyone, and gave government way more power and way less oversight than is safe, because we over-reacted to prevent one bad event, not considering the counterfactual invisible things we would be losing.
This will happen again with Corona, things will be put in place that are maybe good at preventing pandemics (or worse, making people think they’re safe from pandemics), but create a million trivial conveniences every day that add up to more strife than they’re worth.
These types of rules are very hard to repeal after the fact because of absence blindness—someone needs to do the work of calculating the cost/benefit ratio BEFORE they get implemented, then build a convincing enough narrative to what seems obvious/common sense measures given the climate/devastation.

Halffull Mar 26, 2020, 3:51 PM
1 point
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in reply to: EdoArad’s comment on: What posts do you want someone to write?
Curious about what you think is weird in the framing?
The problem framing is basically spot on, talking about how our institution drive our lives. Like I said, basically all the points get it right and apply to broader systemic change like RadX, DAOs, etc.
Then, even though the problem is framed perfectly, the solution section almost universally talks about narrow interventions related to individual decision making like improving calibration.

Halffull 26 Mar 2020 1:05 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Matthew_Barnett’s comment on: Growth and the case against randomista development
No, I actually think the post is ignoring x-risk as a cause area to focus on now. It makes sense under certain assumptions and heuristics (e.g. if you think near term x-risk is highly unlikely, or you’re using absurdity heuristics), I think I was more giving my argument for how this post could be compatible with Bostrom.

Halffull 26 Mar 2020 0:43 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Matthew_Barnett’s comment on: Growth and the case against randomista development
the post focuses on human welfare,
It seems to me that there’s a background assumption of many global poverty EAs that human welfare has positive flowthrough effects for basically everything else.
I’m also very interested in how increased economic growth impacts existential risk.
At one point I was focused on accelerating innovation, but have come to be more worried about increasing x-risk (I have a question somewhere else on the post that gets at this).
I’ve since added a constraint into my innovation acceleration efforts, and now am basically focused on “asymmetric, wisdom-constrained innovation.”

Halffull 26 Mar 2020 0:26 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Matthew_Barnett’s comment on: Growth and the case against randomista development
Let’s say you believe two things:
1. Growth will have flowthrough effects on existential risk.
2. You have a comparative advantage effecting growth over x-risk.
You can agree with Bostrom that x-risk is important, and also think that you should be working on growth. This is something very close to my personal view on what I’m working on.

Halffull 25 Mar 2020 20:58 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: EdoArad’s comment on: What posts do you want someone to write?
I think the framing is weird because of EAs allergy to systemic change, but I think on practice all of the points in that cause profile apply to broader change.

Halffull 25 Mar 2020 17:42 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Halffull’s comment on: Halffull’s Shortform
It’s been pointed out to me on Lesswrong that depressions actually save lives. Which makes the “two curves” narrative much harder to make.