James Ozden

• James Ozden 13 Aug 2022 22:07 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: mariushobbhahn’s comment on: The case for Green Growth skep­ti­cism and GDP agnosticism

  A couple of small points:

  Once renewable energy is abundant most other problems seem to be much easier to solve, e.g. protecting biodiversity if you don’t need the space for coal mines.

  This may be a nitpick but actually the most popular renewables (e.g. wind and solar) need so much land that they could very feasibly be/​already are a threat to biodiversity and land use. See image below for an illustration, from this work from TerraPraxis.

  

  It is very hard, if not impossible to stop growth in developed countries but keep growth in developing countries. Degrowth in the West most likely implies decreased growth in the developing world, which I oppose.

  This seems like a big claim—what are you basing this on? I mean the Industrial Revolution led to the UK/​Global North growing very fast without help from more developed nations so I’m not sure why less developed nations couldn’t also develop quickly without growth in the west.

  Also I think one of the stronger arguments of the post above is about resource use/​other environmental constraints besides carbon emissions. It also seems like you agree that this might pose a problem for long-term/​sustained economic growth? IMO this could be a consideration large enough to sway the argument in either direction.

• James Ozden 10 Aug 2022 22:33 UTC

  2 points

  on: Cause area: Short-sleeper genes

  There is a high behavioral drive among those with FNSS, and individuals report a need to always be mentally active resulting commonly in high profile, high pressure jobs or holding multiple jobs.

  Well this definitely resonated with me—I wonder how true this is for EAs in general vs the general population!

• James Ozden 10 Aug 2022 18:04 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Lorenzo’s comment on: EA 1.0 and EA 2.0; high­light­ing crit­i­cal changes in EA’s evolution

  I wish, it’s so interesting! I found it linked (very surprisingly) in the Time article about Will/​longtermism. From this quote below:

  The expansion has been fueled by a substantial rise in donations. In 2021, EA-aligned foundations distributed more than $600 million in publicly listed grants—roughly quadruple what they gave five years earlier.

• James Ozden 10 Aug 2022 15:28 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: DavidNash’s comment on: EA 1.0 and EA 2.0; high­light­ing crit­i­cal changes in EA’s evolution

  Yeah I agree with that—I guess I was using funding amounts as a proxy for general EA attention which includes stuff like EA Forum posts, orgs working on an issues, focus of EA intro materials, etc etc.

• James Ozden 10 Aug 2022 14:26 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: Aaron Gertler’s comment on: EA 1.0 and EA 2.0; high­light­ing crit­i­cal changes in EA’s evolution

  I think a focus on absolute values seems misleading here. You’re totally right the absolute value of funding has gone up for all cause areas (see this spreadsheet). However, there’s also a pretty clear trend that the relative funding towards global health and animal welfare has gone done quite a lot, from global health going from approximately all of EA funds in 2012 to 54% to 2022. Similarly for Animal Welfare, which seemed to peak at 16% in 2019, might only be 5% in 2022.

  I think this relative shift of attention/​priorities is what people are often referring to when they say “EA has changed” etc.

• James Ozden 9 Aug 2022 10:25 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Stephen Clare’s comment on: Ba­hamian Ad­ven­tures: An Epic Tale of En­trepreneur­ship, AI Strat­egy Re­search and Potatoes

  +1 - I think I’ve seen multiple organisational updates that have achieved less than you Jaime!

• James Ozden 8 Aug 2022 8:59 UTC

  3 points

  on: JamesOz’s Shortform

  Social Change Lab is trying something new, and compiling interesting social movement-related research and news into a monthly (or so) digest. Check out the first edition here and sign up to receive future editions here. Feedback very much welcome!

• James Ozden 27 Jul 2022 13:23 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: The most im­por­tant cli­mate change uncertainty

  Skepticism of the Takakura paper /​ economic modelling of climate damages

  I’m somewhat skeptical of the Takakura paper you mention. First, 2% loss in GDP relative to the counterfactual at 2.7 degrees just seems way too small. I think this is partly due to this paper, which whilst a bit emotive, seems to point out some quite major flaws in Nordhaus’ methodology for calculating climate damages (e.g. 90% of GDP will be unaffected as it happens indoors) who also arrived at 2.1% at 3 degrees warming. Keen in that paper also seems to think that due to the assumption above, plus using the impact of current temperatures on GDP (as you did at the end of your comment, see below), Nordhaus might be underestimating climate damages by an order of magnitude, bringing it to 20%. I feel like a model which has serious methodological flaws (Nordhaus) which produces answer similar to Takakura indicates that Takakura also has things that it hasn’t accounted for.

  Independently, it is just hard to see why 3K would do such massive damage. The world has warmed by nearly a degree since 1980 and average living standards increased by several hundred %. What is the actual mechanism whereby an extra 2K would cause the collapse of civilisation?

  Like above, I think due to nonlinearity in climate impacts/​damages, it doesn’t make sense to that a 1.2 degree temperature increase with little/​no impact on living standards will scale up to 3 degrees of warming with also very little impact on living standards.

  In terms of the mechanism, there’s credible IPCC estimates that put forced migration due to climate change between 25-1000 million people, with a potential median of 200 million people by 2050. In my opinion, forced migration of that scale could play a role in societal destabilisation, even though the chances of this happening might only be quite small (e.g.5%). For example, there is nothing in Takakura about impact of forced migration, civil unrest, etc, which could also mean they’ve underestimated the GDP impacts. There’s probably many other mechanisms they’ve not been able to include, and the world is very complex, so it seems overconfident to put a lot of weight on one paper that only models 9 specific impacts.

  Uncertainty on GDP being a good predictor of x-risk

  Otherwise, I’m not even sure that GDP is the best indicator of the probability of x-risk posed by climate change. Even in Takakura’s paper, they say that:

  We used the percentage of GDP as an impact indicator but we do not claim it is the best or only indicator to evaluate the impacts of climate change.

  For example, one could make a similar claim for AI analogous to what you said about climate:

  The world has warmed by nearly a degree since 1980 and average living standards increased by several hundred %.

  namely: “AI and ML algorithms have developed exponentially in the past 50 years, yet living standards have only gotten better. So how could additional improvements in ML or AI lead to existential risk?”

  Whilst this example probably isn’t perfect, I think it highlights how the past isn’t necessarily a good predictor of future x-risk from certain scenarios. Whilst the AI scenario might lead to more of a rapidly worsening scenario if we develop misaligned AGI, it’s feasible that passing climate tipping points would trigger a serious increase in x-risk that economic models or past GDP metrics fail to account for.

• James Ozden 26 Jul 2022 16:02 UTC

  6 points

  on: Hu­man­ity’s vast fu­ture and its im­pli­ca­tions for cause prioritization

  Heads up that the link to join the Discord seems to be broken! Otherwise would love to join.

  

• James Ozden 22 Jul 2022 9:46 UTC

  14 points

  on: Lean­ing into EA Disillusionment

  Thanks for writing this, this resonated a lot with me. As Brad writes here, I think this provides a good response to why EAs shouldn’t (immediately at least) consider leaving the EA movement if something doesn’t feel right. As you point to, there’s probably lots of things that EA is getting wrong, and people leaving the EA community is likely not going to fix those things. Whilst challenging, I think people with disillusionment persevering (probably with some additional distance) and pushing back on certain things will be important for EA to self-correct.

• James Ozden 21 Jul 2022 16:45 UTC

  2 points

  on: Paper sum­mary: A Para­dox for Tiny Prob­a­bil­ities and Enor­mous Values (Nick Beck­stead and Teruji Thomas)

  Thanks for this—the summary is very useful and means I read a paper I would otherwise not known of! I’ve got a question which might be really obvious/​stupid, but I’m no moral philosopher so apologies if it is.

  I don’t quite follow the example with the choices about A & B, and the probabilities p & q. I looked at the original paper and they formulated it differently (with the addition of C) so I was wondering if you could clear up this question:

  • I don’t fully understand how you’ve structured the table. What I think you mean from the text is:

    • Option A means there is a probability of p+q of saving n lives, and a (1-p-q) probability of saving 0 lives

    • Option B means there is a probability p of saving N+n lives, otherwise saving 0 lives

  • However, from the table, under choice A it looks like you have a probability p of saving n lives, and a probability q of saving n lives, so surely a probability of p+q means you save 2n lives?

• James Ozden 21 Jul 2022 8:03 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Peter S. Park’s comment on: EAs should use Sig­nal in­stead of Face­book Messenger

  If you want a secure alternative to Google Docs, try CryptPad. In my experience, the UX /​ functionality is pretty bad, but if security is your top concern, it might be worth it.

• James Ozden 5 Jul 2022 14:30 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Timothy Chan’s comment on: The Fu­ture Might Not Be So Great.

  Thanks for the reply Timothy, and I totally appreciate you choosing to not engage again as this can be quite time and energy consuming. There’s one thing I wasn’t clear enough in my original comment which I’ve now edited which might mean we’re not as misaligned as one might think!

  Namely, I didn’t say (or even necessarily think) that your comment on the truthfulness of John’s claim was net negative, as you suggest. I’ve edited the original comment but in practice what I meant was, I think there’s better ways of doing so, without questioning the sexual harassment claims actually made by the women affected in these incidents. So overall I agree it’s important to point about claims that are untruthful, but I also think you did this in a way that a) casted doubted on the actual sexual harassment, which IMO seems very likely so it is insensitive to suggest otherwise and b) is damaging to the EA community as a safe place for women.

  For reference, this is what I updated my sentence to in the previous comment:

  Again, I agree there are some epistemic benefits to calling out statements that don’t seem correct, but I think there are also some large downsides to the way you did this in this instance. [edited last sentence only]

High-risk high-re­ward philan­thropy: ap­ply­ing ven­ture cap­i­tal con­cepts to do­ing good

• James Ozden 3 Jul 2022 19:48 UTC

  36 points

  in reply to: Timothy Chan’s comment on: The Fu­ture Might Not Be So Great.

  First, thanks for being honest and saying you’re not particularly well-informed on this, that definitely helped me approach your comment with less judgement. I’ve also seen that you edited your initial comment so thanks for that.

  I do however still have some concerns about the comments you made. I agree that the claim “Jacy admitted several instances of sexual harassment” isn’t very easily verifiable (e.g. the discussion on what the “apology” is for). However, I think that this is largely irrelevant and begins a semantic discussion that is totally missing the original point, and generally missing the forest for the trees.

  The main point John was making is that Jacy has been accused and punished (maybe not the right word?) for several instances of sexual harassment over his career. In my opinion it is almost totally irrelevant whether Jacy himself admits this, as I (and I think many others) think there is very reasonable evidence to believe these instances of sexual harassment happened. Launching into a semantics discussion about whether Jacy admitted it seems to detract from the key point in unhelpful ways, although I agree that John’s comment might have been better if he had totally excluded the line “Jacy admitted several instances of sexual harassment”. Again, I agree there are some epistemic benefits to calling out statements that don’t seem correct, but I think there are also some large downsides to the way you did this in this instance. [edited last sentence for clarity].

  The reason why I’m frustrated by your comments, specifically:

  Then I think it’d be more accurate if you write ‘he admitted to several instances of what I consider to be sexual harassment’.

  is that it brings about an element of questioning of exactly how much Jacy’s acts constituted ‘sexual harassment’. Women are often accused of making things up, exaggerating claims or otherwise reporting “locker room banter” or “harmless jokes” as sexual harassment, and I felt your comments were adding to this. This feels particularly worrying within the EA movement, which is already only 29% female, as it could show women that EA spaces are not safe for women due to lack of care around sexual harassment issues.

  For context, I feel personally strongly about this as I’ve heard from several close women friends of mine who have attended EA events or otherwise met male EAs who have been misogynistic towards them, in ways that have deterred them from becoming more involved in EA. In short, I think EA spaces are already challenging for women to feel comfortable in, without us making comments that seem to trivialise issues of sexual harassment.

  I think the fact that you also said “I think I haven’t had enough time to make a judgment myself.” adds to this. I don’t think it requires a huge amount of effort to update towards ‘Jacy very likely committed instances of sexual harassment’ based on several independent reports of sexual harassment, expulsion from university, his apology, etc. To not update towards this after even a short consideration again implies to me that you’re doubting whether true sexual harassment even occurred (e.g. ignoring reports from several (over 5?) women for comments by 1 man) which would add to the notion of EA spaces not being safe for women.

  Sorry for the slight rant but these are issues that my friends have been affected by within EA spaces, and something I feel strongly about.

• James Ozden 2 Jul 2022 10:58 UTC

  30 points

  in reply to: Timothy Chan’s comment on: The Fu­ture Might Not Be So Great.

  Then I think it’d be more accurate if you write ‘he admitted to several instances of what I consider to be sexual harassment’.

  I’m slightly confused about this. Do you believe that Jacy did commit several instance of sexual harassment but he just hasn’t admitted it? Or you don’t believe Jacy has committed sexual harassment at all?

  If the latter: These instances aren’t what John considers sexual harassment, it’s what several women (over 5 at least from my reading of the Apology post) consider to be sexual harassment. If this reasonably large number of women didn’t think it was sexual harassment, they wouldn’t have complained to CEA or others within the community. Therefore I think we can be somewhat confident that Jacy has made sexual advances that a non-negligible number of women consider to be sexual harassment. Subsequently, as John stated, he made an apology post saying sorry for these instances of sexual harassment (of course he would never put it like that, but just because you don’t specifically say “sorry for sexual harassment” it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen). Basically, we have several independent pieces of evidence of Jacy being involved in sexual harassment (reports from 5+ women, being distanced from CEA, being expelled from Brown university) with the only piece of evidence pointing against this being Jacy’s own comments, which is of course biased. Given this, I think a claim that Jacy hasn’t been involved in sexual harassment seems wrong.

  If the former: I think this is quite pedantic and it’s irrelevant whether Jacy admits to the bad behaviour, if we have enough evidence to be confident it happened.

• James Ozden 2 Jul 2022 10:41 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: Owen Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: The Fu­ture Might Not Be So Great.

  This feels off to me. It seems like Jacy deliberately misled people to think that he was a co-founder of EA, to likely further his own career. This feels like a core element of lying, to deceive people for personal gain, which I think is the main reason one would claim they’re the co-founder of EA when almost no one else would say this about them.

  Sure I think it can also be called “gross exaggeration” but where do you think the line is between “gross exaggeration” and “lying”? For me, lying means you say something that isn’t true (in the eyes of most people) for significant personal gain (i.e. status) whereas gross exaggeration is a smaller embellishment and/​or isn’t done for large personal gain.

• James Ozden 20 Jun 2022 21:12 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: jackva’s comment on: Dis­rup­tive cli­mate protests in the UK didn’t lead to a loss of pub­lic sup­port for cli­mate policies

  Thanks Johannes!

  We thought about doing this but ruled it out as there would be a pretty clear bias e.g. the people who are most likely to hear about Just Stop Oil are people who are climate-conscious already, and are therefore more susceptible to positive shifts. I think we did do this informally, and did find a positive correlation between knowledge of Just Stop Oil and the constructs, but I don’t think it’s particularly robust.

  Thinking out loud but maybe one way to control for this might be doing this within groups of people who answered the same to “How concerned are you about climate change” in the first survey, although this might make our sample sizes quite small /​ no longer representative.

Dis­rup­tive cli­mate protests in the UK didn’t lead to a loss of pub­lic sup­port for cli­mate policies

• James Ozden 17 Jun 2022 16:58 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Charles Dillon ’s comment on: How ac­cu­rate are Open Phil’s pre­dic­tions?

  I’m probably missing something but doesn’t the graph show OP is under-confident in the 0-10 and 10-20 bins? e.g. those data points are above the dotted grey line of perfect calibration where the 90%+ bin is far below?