Isaac King

Stop talk­ing about p(doom)

• Isaac KingDec 19, 2023, 3:18 AM

  2 points

  1 ∶ 1

  in reply to: JoelMcGuire’s comment on: Pat My­ron’s Shortform

  Isn’t that what the strong upvote is for?

• Isaac KingMar 30, 2023, 7:29 PM

  −5 points

  2 ∶ 2

  in reply to: burner9372’s comment on: A state­ment and an apology

  The fact that this comment is at −160 karma is frankly shocking to me. Trust is important in any community, and the fact that people appear to be completely dismissing the fact that Owen and anon had established an atypical norm of honesty and forthcomingness about their thoughts and emotions and are choosing to frame this norm being followed as somehow inappropriate makes me expect that any agreements I might make with another EA will likely be broken as soon as it’s socially advantageous to do so. I enjoy and appreciate the EA community because, at least up until recently, people here seemed committed to caring about what’s true and what will maximally benefit the world, not jumping on the social shaming bandwagon. I sincerely hope I’m misunderstanding what’s going on here, because if EA really is giving up their epistemic integrity as it looks to me like is happening here, that indicates a much darker future than I expected.

  (It’s theoretically possible that all the downvotes are people disagreeing with the last paragraph only, and I think disagreement with that one is indeed much more justified. But the first four paragraphs are clearly the main point of this comment, and if someone agrees with those and disagrees with the last one, I don’t think they should be downvoting the comment overall.)

• Isaac KingNov 15, 2022, 3:34 AM

  14 points

  3 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Sabs’s comment on: The FTX Fu­ture Fund team has resigned

  I can tell you why I downvoted it.

  Cryptocurrency doesn’t actually work

  False, it works just fine. It’s a token that can’t be duplicated and people can send to each other without any centralized authority.

  and only is there for scams and fraud.

  There are indeed a lot of those, but scams and fraud were very clearly not the intention of its creators. Realistically they were cryptography nerds who wanted to make something cool, or libertarians with overly-idealistic visions of the future.

  Not surprising that FTX collapsed.

  Clear hindsight bias. This person should have made some money betting against FTX before it collapsed and then I’d take them more seriously.

  Basically, the comment is just your standard “cryptocurrency bad” take, without any attempt at justifying their claims or even saying much of anything other than expressing in an inflammatory way that they don’t like cryptocurrency.

• Isaac KingNov 15, 2022, 3:21 AM

  8 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ivy Mazzola’s comment on: In Defense of SBF

  Very reasonable! I understand you feel like you have to walk a fine line in order to not trigger social disapproval of your words; I think that’s bad, and to be clear, I did not mean to make it seem like I disapproved of your comment. I wish EA could be a place where everyone felt comfortable speaking naturally without having to add a bunch of disclaimers.

• Isaac KingNov 15, 2022, 2:36 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Ivy Mazzola’s comment on: In Defense of SBF

  I just wanted to mention that this comment tripped my “bravery debate” detector. I still upvoted it because honestly the bravery debate framing seems correct here, and I said something similar in my own comments earlier. But then again, everyone who engages in bravery debates thinks their framing is accurate. So let’s be careful not to give posts additional weight just because they’re speaking against majority EA opinion.

• Isaac KingNov 15, 2022, 2:01 AM

  −8 points

  2 ∶ 4

  in reply to: Isaac King’s comment on: In Defense of SBF

  I see it’s now up to +18, which is promising. Implies that people who vote without fully reading the post are more likely to downvote than upvote.

• Isaac KingNov 15, 2022, 1:05 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: The FTX Fu­ture Fund team has resigned

  A summary of sorts is being compiled here:

[Question] What are some high im­pact short-term ac­tions for peo­ple who don’t want to make long com­mit­ments?

• Isaac KingNov 14, 2022, 5:17 PM

  13 points

  5 ∶ 5

  on: In Defense of SBF

  And on a personal note, I aspire to create a lot of value for the world, and direct it towards doing lots of good. Call me overconfident, but I expect to be a billionaire someday. The way EA treats SBF here sets a precedent: if the EA community is happy to accept money when the going is good, but then is ready to cut ties once the money dries up… you can guess how excited I would be to contribute in the first place.

  This is a weird paragraph. If your goal were doing the most good, why would it matter how you expect EA to treat you in the case of failure? It kinda sounds like your goal is social status among the EA community.

  This isn’t to say that you don’t have a good point. If people are donating to EA because they want social status, that’s still money going towards good causes, and perhaps we should reward them for that in order to encourage more people to do so. But I’d have a hard time calling that “altruistic behavior” on their part.

• Isaac KingNov 14, 2022, 5:03 PM

  15 points

  6 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Isaac King’s comment on: In Defense of SBF

  Yeah, reading further, I definitely don’t agree with a lot of these claims. But the fact that I feel like I have to post this clarification in order to avoid getting downvoted myself is something I think needs to be talked about. The original post is now down to −15, and I haven’t even finished reading it.

• Isaac KingNov 14, 2022, 4:58 PM

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Isaac King’s comment on: In Defense of SBF

• Isaac KingNov 14, 2022, 4:56 PM

  23 points

  14 ∶ 1

  on: In Defense of SBF

  Thank you for posting this. I haven’t yet read through the whole thing yet, and I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I think it’s important that people feel comfortable expressing their opinions here. The fact that within minutes of posting this has gotten −8 votes is something I find concerning, as I doubt those people have even had time to read and process what you said before voting and I suspect they’re voting based on anger and groupthink. I hope the community will be able to have a productive conversation in these comments.

• Isaac KingOct 13, 2022, 2:28 AM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Warn­ing Shots Prob­a­bly Wouldn’t Change The Pic­ture Much

  I’ll just note that I have a prediction market on this here, which is currently at a 7% chance of some prominent event causing mainstream AI capabilities researchers to start taking the risk more seriously by 2028.

• Isaac KingSep 22, 2022, 12:08 AM

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Quan­tified In­tu­itions: An epistemics train­ing web­site in­clud­ing a new EA-themed cal­ibra­tion app

  But anecdotally, many EAs still feel uncomfortable quantifying their intuitions and continue to prefer using words like “likely” and “plausible” which could be interpreted in many ways.

  This issue is likely to get worse as the EA movement attempts to grow quickly, with many new members joining who are coming in with various backgrounds and perspectives on the value of subjective credences

  Don’t take this as a serious criticism; I just found it funny.

• Isaac KingSep 7, 2022, 11:39 PM

  18 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Who are some less-known peo­ple like Petrov?

  Hugh Thompson Jr. ended the Mỹ Lai massacre by instructing their helicopter crew to fire on their own military’s soldiers if they continued to kill innocent civilians, then informed command of what was going on and got them to order the company committing the massacre to stop.

  All sorts of people helped Jews escape the Holocaust at their own risk. Oskar Schindler, for example, was originally a member of the Nazi party, then saw what was going on and spent their entire fortune on bribes to keep their Jewish employees from being sent to concentration camps. They pivoted their business from manufacturing cookware to manufacturing anti-tank grenades (and tried to manufacture as few as possible) in order to get those employees classified as “vital to the war effort”. They went bankrupt and had to live much of the rest of their life off of financial aid from the Jews they had saved.

  There have been a number of other nuclear close calls that may well have been prevented by a single person, but I don’t know the details.

  Maybe Georges Picquart for their rule in the Dreyfus affair. Kolmogorov sheltering Jews. Jimmy Carter trying to end racial discrimination against the desires of their constituents.

• Isaac KingAug 11, 2022, 12:10 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: What’s al­ive right now?

  What’s the significance of the two different columns under the heading “Billion tonnes of carbon” in the first table? What does it mean for the number to be in one or the other?

• Isaac KingJun 2, 2022, 5:58 PM

  7 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Stuff I buy and use: a lis­ti­cle to boost your con­sumer sur­plus and productivity

  I have the opposite issue with my Macbook: The screen brightness settings range only from “bright” to “extremely bright”. When I’m using it in a dark room I’d like to be able to dim the screen down to a reasonable level, but that’s simply not possible.

• Isaac KingMay 19, 2022, 6:48 AM

  17 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: What are some high-EV but failed EA pro­jects?

  Carrick Flynn’s congressional campaign just failed.

  https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​Qi9nnrmjwNbBqWbNT/​​the-best-usd5-800-i-ve-ever-donated-to-pandemic-prevention

• Isaac KingApr 30, 2022, 6:29 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: James Lin’s comment on: What ex­am­ples are there of (sci­ence) fic­tion pre­dict­ing some­thing strange/​bad, which then hap­pened?

  This appears to be a list of all science fiction technology, even if it doesn’t exist in real life. For example I see “antigravity” on this list.