JanBrauner

• JanBrauner 11 Apr 2020 18:47 UTC

  1 point

  on: Is any­one work­ing on a com­par­a­tive COVID-19 policy re­sponse dataset?

  I’m not com­pletely sure if I un­der­stand what you are look­ing for, but:

  http://​​epi­demicfore­cast­ing.org/​​con­tain­ment

  https://​​www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/​​re­search/​​re­search-pro­jects/​​oxford-covid-19-gov­ern­ment-re­sponse-tracker

  https://​​www.acaps.org/​​pro­jects/​​covid19/​​data

• JanBrauner 28 Mar 2020 19:41 UTC

  2 points

  on: Are se­lec­tion forces se­lect­ing for or against al­tru­ism? Will peo­ple in the fu­ture be more, as, or less al­tru­is­tic?

  I wrote down some mus­ings about this (in­clud­ing a few rele­vant links) in ap­pendix 2 here.

• JanBrauner 11 Mar 2020 20:43 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: Toby Ord’s ‘The Precipice’ is pub­lished!

  I think I over­heard Toby say­ing that the foot­notes and ap­pen­dices were dropped in the au­dio­book and that, yes, the foot­notes and ap­pen­dices (which make up 50% of the book) should be the most in­ter­est­ing part for peo­ple already fa­mil­iar with the X-risk liter­a­ture.

• JanBrauner 14 Feb 2020 22:00 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: How do you feel about the main EA face­book group?

  No

• JanBrauner 12 Feb 2020 21:39 UTC

  47 points

  on: How do you feel about the main EA face­book group?

  So this is my very per­sonal im­pres­sion. I might be su­per wrong about this, that’s why I asked this ques­tion. Also, I re­mem­ber lik­ing the main EA face­book group quite a bit in the past, so maybe I just can’t prop­erly re­late to how use­ful the group is for peo­ple that are newer to EA think­ing.

  Cur­rently, I avoid read­ing the EA face­book group the same way I avoid read­ing com­ments un­der youtube videos. Read­ing the group makes me an­gry and sad be­cause of the ig­no­rance and ag­gres­sion dis­played in the posts and es­pe­cially in the com­ments. I think many com­ments do not meet the bar for in­tel­lec­tual qual­ity or epistemic stan­dards that we should have EA as­so­ci­ated with. That’s re­ally no sur­prise, on­line dis­course is not par­tic­u­larly known for high qual­ity.

  Over­all, I feel like the main EA face­book group doesn’t shine a great light on the EA move­ment. I haven’t thought much about this, but I think I would pre­fer stronger mod­er­a­tion for qual­ity.

[Question] How do you feel about the main EA face­book group?

• JanBrauner 13 Jan 2020 20:05 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Jonas Vollmer’s comment on: EAF’s bal­lot ini­ti­a­tive dou­bled Zurich’s de­vel­op­ment aid

  I first thought that “coun­ter­pro­posal passed” means that a pro­posal very differ­ent to the one you sug­gested passed the bal­lot. But skim­ming the links, it seems that the coun­ter­pro­pos­als were ac­tu­ally similar to your origi­nal pro­pos­als?

• JanBrauner 7 Dec 2019 21:11 UTC

  20 points

  in reply to: Manuel_Allgaier’s comment on: A sin­gle per­son de­cides about fund­ing for com­mu­nity builders world-wide

  Thanks for bring­ing this to my at­ten­tion, I mod­ified the ti­tle and a re­spec­tive part in the post.

  
  

  I didn’t have the time to check in with CEA be­fore writ­ing the post so I had to choose be­tween writ­ing the post as is or not writ­ing it at all. That’s why the first line says (in ital­ics) “I’m not en­tirely sure that there is re­ally no other offi­cial source for lo­cal group fund­ing. Please cor­rect me in the com­ments. ”

  I think I could have pre­dicted that this is not enough to keep peo­ple from walk­ing away with a false im­pres­sion so I think I should have cho­sen a differ­ent head­line.

• JanBrauner 24 Oct 2019 23:14 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Matthew_Barnett’s comment on: The evolu­tion­ary ar­gu­ment against cog­ni­tive en­hance­ment re­search is weak

  That mostly seems to be se­man­tics to me. There could be other things that we are cur­rently “defi­cient” in and we could figure that out by do­ing cog­ni­tive en­hance­ment re­search.

  As far as I know, the term “cog­ni­tive en­hance­ment” is of­ten used in the sense that I used it here, e.g. re­lat­ing to ex­er­cise (we are cur­rently defi­cient in ex­er­cise com­pared to our an­ces­tors), tak­ing mela­tonin (we are defi­cient in mela­tonin com­pared to our an­ces­tors), and so on...

• JanBrauner 24 Oct 2019 23:04 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Harri Besceli’s comment on: A sin­gle per­son de­cides about fund­ing for com­mu­nity builders world-wide

  Great to hear that sev­eral peo­ple are in­volved with mak­ing the grant de­ci­sions. I also want to stress that my post is not at all in­tended as a cri­tique of the CBG pro­gramme.

• JanBrauner 24 Oct 2019 22:55 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Michelle_Hutchinson’s comment on: A sin­gle per­son de­cides about fund­ing for com­mu­nity builders world-wide

  I agree that there is more to move­ment build­ing than lo­cal groups and that the com­par­i­son to AI safety was not on the right level.

  I still stand by my main point and think that it de­serves con­sid­er­a­tion:

  My main point is that there is a cer­tain set of move­ment build­ing efforts for which the CEA com­mu­nity build­ing grant pro­gramme seems to be the only op­tion. This set in­cludes lo­cal groups and na­tional EA net­works but also other things. Some com­mon char­ac­ter­is­tics might be that these efforts are ori­ented to­wards the ear­lier stages of the move­ment build­ing fun­nel (com­pared to say, EAG) and can be con­ducted by in­de­pen­dent move­ment builders.

  Ideally, there should be more di­verse “offi­cial” fund­ing for this set of move­ment build­ing efforts. As things cur­rently are, pri­vate fun­ders should at least be aware that only one ma­jor offi­cial fund­ing source ex­ists.

  (If stu­dents run­ning stu­dent groups can get funded by the uni­ver­sity, that is an­other fund­ing source that I wasn’t aware of be­fore).

Only a few peo­ple de­cide about fund­ing for com­mu­nity builders world-wide

The evolu­tion­ary ar­gu­ment against cog­ni­tive en­hance­ment re­search is weak

• JanBrauner 30 Sep 2019 19:17 UTC

  3 points

  on: Lat­est EA Up­dates for Septem­ber 2019

  Love the “Grants” section

• JanBrauner 22 Sep 2019 23:40 UTC

  9 points

  on: What should Founders Pledge re­search?

  cog­ni­tive en­hance­ment research

• JanBrauner 6 Sep 2019 22:18 UTC

  4 points

  on: Alien coloniza­tion of Earth’s im­pact the the rel­a­tive im­por­tance of re­duc­ing differ­ent ex­is­ten­tial risks

  We wrote a bit about a re­lated topic in part 2.1 here: https://​​fo­rum.effec­tivealtru­ism.org/​​posts/​​NfkEqssr7qDazTquW/​​the-ex­pected-value-of-ex­tinc­tion-risk-re­duc­tion-is-positive

  In there, we also cite a few posts by peo­ple who have thought about similar is­sues be­fore. Most no­tably, as so of­ten, this post by Brian To­masik:

  https://​​foun­da­tional-re­search.org/​​risks-of-as­tro­nom­i­cal-fu­ture-suffer­ing/​​#What_if_hu­man_coloniza­tion_is_more_hu­mane_than_ET_colonization

• JanBrauner 6 Sep 2019 21:13 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Kit’s comment on: Are we liv­ing at the most in­fluen­tial time in his­tory?

  How I see it:

  Ex­tinc­tion risk re­duc­tion (and other type of “di­rect work”) af­fects all fu­ture gen­er­a­tions similarly. If the most in­fluen­tial cen­tury is still to come, ex­tinc­tion risk re­duc­tion also af­fects the peo­ple al­ive dur­ing that cen­tury (by mak­ing sure they ex­ist). Thus, ex­tinc­tion risk re­duc­tion has a “punt­ing to fu­ture gen­er­a­tions that live in hingey times” com­po­nent. How­ever, ex­tinc­tion risk re­duc­tion also af­fects all the un­hingey fu­ture gen­er­a­tions di­rectly, and the effects are not pri­mar­ily me­di­ated through the peo­ple al­ive in the most in­fluen­tial cen­turies.

  (Then, by defi­ni­tion, if ours is not a very hingey time, di­rect work is not a very promis­ing strat­egy for punt­ing. The effect on peo­ple al­ive dur­ing the “most in­fluen­tial times” has to be small by defi­ni­tion. If di­rect work did strongly en­able the peo­ple liv­ing in the most in­fluen­tial cen­tury (e.g. by strongly in­creas­ing the chance that they come into ex­is­tence), it would also en­able many other gen­er­a­tions a lot. This would im­ply that the pre­sent was quite hingey af­ter all, in con­tra­dic­tion to the as­sump­tion that the pre­sent is un­hingey.)

  Punt­ing strate­gies, in con­trast, af­fect fu­ture gen­er­a­tions pri­marly via their effect on the peo­ple al­ive in the most in­fluen­tial cen­turies.

  What links here?

  • MichaelA's comment on Prob­lem ar­eas be­yond 80,000 Hours’ cur­rent pri­ori­ties by Ardenlk (23 Jun 2020 23:49 UTC; 12 points)

• JanBrauner 16 Feb 2019 20:55 UTC

  2 points

  on: Risk fac­tors for s-risks

  I don’t have much to add, but I still wanted to say that I re­ally liked this:

  • great per­spec­tive, risk fac­tors seem to be a re­ally use­ful con­cept here

  • Very clearly written

• JanBrauner 30 Dec 2018 19:13 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: The ex­pected value of ex­tinc­tion risk re­duc­tion is positive

  Th­ese are all very good points. I agree that this part of the ar­ti­cle is spec­u­la­tive, and you could eas­ily come to a differ­ent con­clu­sion.

  Over­all, I still think that this ar­gu­ment alone (part 1.2 of the ar­ti­cle) points into the di­rec­tion of ex­tinc­tion risk re­duc­tion be­ing pos­i­tive. Although the con­clu­sion does de­pend on the “de­fault level of welfare of sen­tient tools” that we are dis­cussing in this thread, it more crit­i­cally de­pends on whether fu­ture agents’ prefer­ences will be al­igned with ours.

  But I never gave this ar­gu­ment (part 1.2) that much weight any­way. I think that the ar­gu­ments later in that ar­ti­cle (part 2 on­wards, I listed them in my an­swer to Jacy’s com­ment) are more ro­bust and thus more rele­vant. So maybe I some­what dis­agree with your state­ment:

  The ex­pected value of the fu­ture could be ex­tremely sen­si­tive to be­liefs about these sets (their sizes and av­er­age welfares). (And this could be a rea­son to pri­ori­tize moral cir­cle ex­pan­sion in­stead.)

  To some de­gree this state­ment is, of course, true. The un­cer­tainty gives some rea­son to de­pri­ori­tize ex­tinc­tion risk re­duc­tion. But: The ex­pected value of the fu­ture (with (post-) hu­man­ity) might be quite sen­si­tive to these be­liefs, but the ex­pected value of ex­tinc­tion risk re­duc­tion efforts is not the same as the ex­pected value of the fu­ture. You also need to con­sider what would hap­pen if hu­man­ity goes ex­tinct (non-hu­man an­i­mals, S-risks by omis­sion), non-ex­tinc­tion long-term effects of global catas­tro­phes, op­tion value,… (see my com­ments to Jacy). So the ques­tion of whether to pri­ori­tize moral cir­cle ex­pan­sion is maybe not ex­tremely sen­si­tive to “be­liefs about these sets [of sen­tient tools]”.

• JanBrauner 30 Dec 2018 18:45 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Jacy_Reese’s comment on: The ex­pected value of ex­tinc­tion risk re­duc­tion is positive

  Hey Jacy,

  I have writ­ten up my thoughts on all these points in the ar­ti­cle. Here are the links.

  • “The uni­verse might already be filled with suffer­ing and post-hu­mans might do some­thing against it.”

  Part 2.2

  • “Global catas­tro­phes, that don’t lead to ex­tinc­tion, might have nega­tive long-term effects”

  Part 3

  • “Other non-hu­man an­i­mal civ­i­liza­tions might be worse

  Part 2.1

  The fi­nal para­graphs of each sec­tions usu­ally con­tain dis­cus­sion of how rele­vant I think each ar­gu­ment is. All these sec­tions also have some quan­ti­ta­tive EV-es­ti­mates (linked or in the foot­notes).

  But you prob­a­bly saw that, since it is also ex­plained in the ab­stract. So I am not sure what you mean when you say:

  It’d be great if at some point you could write up dis­cus­sion of those other ar­gu­ments,

  Are we talk­ing about the same ar­gu­ments?