jimrandomh

Karma: 1,135

jimrandomh Jan 14, 2023, 5:54 AM
53 points
16 ∶ 22
on: [Linkpost] FLI alleged to have offered funding to far right foundation
Yeah, no, this story is not overall plausible and I would bet at better than 50-50 odds that there’s a major misrepresentation here regarding what happened. Option 1 is that a grant was approved pending due diligence, then pulled during the due diligence process. That would be mildly embarrassing, and would probably imply a grant evaluator somewhere didn’t do their job, but it wouldn’t be the scandal that this purports to be. Option 2 is that the letter of intent is an outright forgery.
What links here?
- JWS 🔸's comment on FLI FAQ on the rejected grant proposal controversy by Tegmark (Jan 21, 2023, 1:57 PM; 10 points)

jimrandomh Jan 11, 2023, 12:20 AM
167 points
57 ∶ 20
on: AGI and the EMH: markets are not expecting aligned or unaligned AI in the next 30 years
Lots of the comments here are pointing at details of the markets and whether it’s possible to profit off of knowing that transformative AI is coming. Which is all fine and good, but I think there’s a simple way to look at it that’s very illuminating.
The stock market is good at predicting company success because there are a lot of people trading in it who think hard about which companies will succeed, doing things like writing documents about those companies’ target markets, products, and leadership. Traders who do a good job at this sort of analysis get more funds to trade with, which makes their trading activity have a larger impact on the prices.
Now, when you say that:
the market is decisively rejecting – i.e., putting very low probability on – the development of transformative AI in the very near term, say within the next ten years.
I think what you’re claiming is that market prices are substantially controlled by traders who have a probability like that in their heads. Or traders who are following an algorithm which had a probability like that in the spreadsheet. Or something thing like that. Some sort of serious cognition, serious in the way that traders treat company revenue forecasts.
And I think that this is false. I think their heads don’t contain any probability for transformative AI at all. I think that if you could peer into the internal communications of trading firms, and you went looking for their thoughts about AI timelines affecting interest rates, you wouldn’t find thoughts like that. And if you did find an occasional trader who had such thoughts, and quantified how much impact they would have on the prices if they went all-in on trading based on that theory, you would find their impact was infinitesimal.
Market prices aren’t mystical, they’re aggregations of traders’ cognition. If the cognition isn’t there, then the market price can’t tell you anything. If the cognition is there but it doesn’t control enough of the capital to move the price, then the price can’t tell you anything.
I think this post is a trap for people who think of market prices as a slightly mystical source of information, who don’t have much of a model of what cognition is behind those prices.
What links here?

jimrandomh Jan 10, 2023, 11:19 PM
5 points
3 ∶ 2
in reply to: Joel Becker’s comment on: AGI and the EMH: markets are not expecting aligned or unaligned AI in the next 30 years
Narrow the thought experiment to “cancer that banks aren’t able to find out about” and the thought experiment goes through fine. And US institutions are strongly supportive of secrecy, in general, so I think this is actually the typical case (at least for people who are young enough that seeking a large loan is not itself suspicious).

jimrandomh Jan 3, 2023, 9:04 PM
5 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Suggestions for effective homelessness donations in San Francisco?
I don’t have an inside view on specific homeless charities in SF, but I do have an outside-view impression that the amount of money going in, contrasted with the results being achieved, implies that something is more-wrong-than-usual. That is, I think money is probably not just being spent inefficiently, but outright embezzled. It should be possible to identify individual charities to donate to doing good work, but EA’s usual charity-oversight methodology is typically aimed at catching dumb ideas, not at catching outright fraud.

jimrandomh Nov 13, 2022, 8:22 PM
3 points
1 ∶ 2
in reply to: Miguel’s comment on: FTX prob related: Strongly Recommending Creating An Internal Audit Committee that will Periodically Assess EA Organizations, Its Objectives And Processes Based on IIA Standards
If a charity asks a donor for financial audits, the response is going to be: We don’t do paperwork for you. You do paperwork for us. Followed by giving the donation to someone else.

jimrandomh Nov 13, 2022, 3:33 AM
23 points
3 ∶ 0
on: FTX prob related: Strongly Recommending Creating An Internal Audit Committee that will Periodically Assess EA Organizations, Its Objectives And Processes Based on IIA Standards
I think the EA community should have an organization full of private investigators and forensic accountants tucked away somewhere, with a broad mandate to look for problems focused on EA-connected places.
But FTX is a for-profit corporation. The fact that they’re making donations doesn’t give anyone the power to impose accounting standards on them; that capability is only held by government institutions with power of subpoena.

jimrandomh Nov 11, 2022, 10:50 PM
55 points
14 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sharmake’s comment on: The FTX Future Fund team has resigned
I heard the same claim, from a different source: that SBF did something unethical at Alameda Research prior to founding FTX, that some EAs had left Alameda saying that SBF was unethical and no one should work with him, and that there were privately circulated warnings to this effect. (The person I heard this from hasn’t spoken publicly about it yet as far as I know. They are someone with no previous or current involvement with FTX or Alameda Research, who I think is reporting honestly and is well positioned to have heard such things.)
(EDIT: others along the rumor-path via which I heard this have now spoken on this thread, in greater detail than I have; so this comment is a duplicate report and should not be coutned.)

jimrandomh Oct 17, 2022, 8:23 PM
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: EA Forum feature suggestion thread
The story of how it got that way is that agree/disagree was originally built as an experiment-with-voting-systems feature, with the key component of that being that different posts can have different voting systems without conflict. (See eg this thread for another voting system we tried.)
The main reason for hesitation (other ForumMagnum developers might not agree) is that I’m not really convinced that 2-axis voting is the right voting system, and expanding it from a posts-have-different-voting-systems context to a whole-site-is-2-axis context limits the options for future experimentation. In particular, there’s a big unresolved fundamental issue in how votes conflate positivity with engagement, which I really want to solve some day.

jimrandomh Sep 13, 2022, 3:40 PM
39 points
20 ∶ 2
in reply to: LB’s comment on: Democratising risk: a community misled
Phil Torres is not currently a deadname. A deadname is a name that someone is no longer using in their public persona, but the name Phil is displayed prominently on their web page. Searching Amazon for Phil Torres finds their books, searching Amazon for Emile Torres does not.
Moreover, it’s basically impossible to understand what’s going on here without knowing that Phil and Emile are the same person, and asking the original poster to avoid mentioning the name-mapping is asking them to obfuscate.

jimrandomh Sep 13, 2022, 7:39 AM
8 points
11 ∶ 2
in reply to: LB’s comment on: Democratising risk: a community misled
Erring in the direction of they/them is fine, but I object to pronoun-policing when it’s done on another person’s behalf, and the pronoun that was used is one that the person is currently advertising as correct in any prominent place (such as at the bottom of this page).

jimrandomh Sep 13, 2022, 7:16 AM
31 points
10 ∶ 4
in reply to: Eevee🔹’s comment on: Democratising risk: a community misled
Phil/Émile changed name, but did not change pronouns. A Facebook post I saw indicated that the name change was to avoid confusion with a different Phil Torres, who is an entomologist. While their Twitter profile specifies they/them pronouns, their Facebook profile says he/him (both profiles have the updated name). I think under any reasonable etiquette standard, that means either pronoun is acceptable unless they directly say otherwise.
What links here?
- Habryka [Deactivated]'s comment on A Letter to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists by John G. Halstead (Nov 24, 2022, 8:09 PM; 8 points)

jimrandomh Aug 25, 2022, 4:21 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: What are cool things university groups can do for Petrov day on 26 September?
If your group hasn’t done the Petrov Day ritual, this is a good place to start. (There are several variants to choose from, and it’s a living tradition, so making your own variant is encouraged, though obviously not required.)

jimrandomh Aug 23, 2022, 1:49 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Request for feedback—CA water data application for google dot org climate challenge
22. If successful, in five years the impact of our project will be…
Eighty percent of California water utilities will be implementing leading water efficiency programmatic practices to bring down the water consumption of urban areas and we are able to implement these analytics in any area of the world faced with an aridifying climate.
I was under the impression that California’s water problems are almost entirely agricultural, meaning that improving urban-area water use in particular won’t help because that’s not where the water is going. I’m not entirely sure whether that’s true—that seems like something a water—analytics organization will want to be able to tell me—but if it is true, it means your success criteria should probably be more focused on irrigation techniques rather than urban consumers. Eg “farms adopt irrigation techniques which lose less to evaporation, and rainfall-adjusted irrigation water consumption per unit of food production falls 20%”, or something like that.

jimrandomh Jul 17, 2022, 6:08 PM
19 points
0 ∶ 0
on: What kind of organization should be the first to develop AGI in a potential arms race?
If there’s an arms race dynamic, it’s probably a disaster no matter who wins. Having room to delay for late-stage alignment experiments is the barest minimum requirement in order for humanity to have any chance of survival. So the best case is to not have an arms race at all. The next-best thing is for the organization that wins to be the sort of organization that could stop at the brink for late-stage alignment research, if its leader decided to, and for it to have a stable leader who’s sane enough to make that decision. Then maximize the size of the gap to second place, to increase the probability and length of that delay.
Needing it to be possible to stop rules out all of government and academia in the US as the US exists now, since those organizations have their high-level decisions made by distant committees, who typically have strong incentives to maintain whatever superficially looks like the status quo, don’t typically have the prerequisites to undersand alignment-related strategy, and don’t have the technical expertise to recognize when they’re at the brink.
I believe that, of all of the organizations that could plausibly win an AGI arms race, this uniquely identifies DeepMind. I do have some misgivings about DeepMind’s strategy, and I don’t have full confidence that Demis would recognize when we’re at the brink or stop there, but no other organization seems even vaguely plausible.

jimrandomh Jul 11, 2022, 1:14 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Does biodiversity loss warrant being it’s own cause area?
I don’t think biodiversity is good, in fact it’s probably bad. If we replaced natural ecosystems with curated ones, we’d have much less of a problem with zoonotic transmissions creating new diseases and pests, probably better nature aesthetics, and maybe some ability to use ecosystems to remove pollutants that are currently hard to get rid of.
It’s important to remember that most of the US population was exposed to a significant amount of environmentalist propaganda as children, before they were able to think critically, and that there were falsehoods embedded in that propaganda. Ecosystems do not spontaneously turn into wastelands when they’re perturbed; they mostly turn into boring forests and things like that.

jimrandomh Jun 20, 2022, 7:05 AM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: How to approach the dilemma between the law of unintended consequences and the consequences of nonaction?
Too abstract. Second-order effects are mostly not mysterious, they’re things which you can predict, not perfectly but usually well enough, if you look at the right parts of the world and apply some economics. If someone’s arguing against an intervention because they think the intervention will have bad second-order effects, then the followup question is whether those effects are real and how big they are. Answering that means looking at the details.
That said, in my experience, if you come across an argument between two people, and one person is saying Something Must Be Done, and the other person is saying You Fool That Will Backfire For Reasons I Will Explain, the second person is almost always right.

jimrandomh Mar 17, 2022, 9:40 PM
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Labeling cash transfers to solve charcoal-related problems?
I think this is a decent idea given a small reframe. Rather than thinking of it as earmarking the cash for a specific purpose, treating it like an unenforced restriction, instead think of the cash transfers as having an opportunity to provide information attached, and try to provide good information. Ie, instead of “this cash transfer is for X”, say “this cash transfer comes with a small pamphlet with several purchase ideas X,Y,Z”. This framing is more cooperative, and fails more gracefully if the recommendations are bad.
What links here?
- Bulking information additionalities in global development for medium-term local prosperity by brb243 (Apr 11, 2022, 5:52 PM; 4 points)

jimrandomh Feb 7, 2022, 9:46 PM
25 points
0 ∶ 0
on: New EA Cause Area: Run Blackwell’s Bookstore
Conventional wisdom in the business world is that brick-and-mortar retail (and brick-and-mortar books in particular) is a declining business, because it can’t compete effectively with online stores. So I’m really skeptical of whether this business is financial viable to survive without continuous infusions of external cash, let alone with enough slack to do things that aren’t profit motivated.
What that means practice is you haven’t actually pinned the cost down to the right order of magnitude. Neither of the business sales you mentioned is comparable; B&N is an online store and an eReader brand, Books-A-Million was sold in 2014 and since then appears to have diversified into a lot of other businesses. More importantly, the main cost isn’t the sale price, it’s taking responsibility for the operational losses. This doesn’t tell me what order of magnitude that cost will be.
Building a publisher could be a thing, but owning this retail chain is strictly negative for that. You definitely aren’t getting the relevant trademarks out of the deal and will not be able to publish under the brand, ever, unless you separately buy the trademarks from the 2007 buyer, and if you’re going that route you’re shopping for a publishing house not a bookstore chain.
(Copy-pasted from pre-publication comments on a Google Docs doc)

jimrandomh Jun 2, 2021, 8:33 PM
16 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Help me find the crux between EA/XR and Progress Studies
How does XR weigh costs and benefits?
Does XR consider tech progress default-good or default-bad?
The core concept here is differential intellectual progress. Tech progress can be bad if it reorders the sequence of technological developments to be worse, by making a hazard precede its mitigation. In practice, that applies mainly to gain-of-function research and to some, but not all, AI/ML research. There are lots of outstanding disagreements between rationalists about which AI/ML research is good vs bad, which, when zoomed in on, reveal disagreements about AI timeline and takeoff forecasts, and about the feasibility of particular AI-safety research directions.
Progress in medicine (especially aging- and cryonics-related medicine) is seen very positively (though there’s a deep distrust of the existing institutions in this area, which bottoms out in a lot of rationalists doing their own literature reviews and wishing they could do their own experiments).
On a more gut/emotional level, I would plug my own Petrov Day ritual as attempting to capture the range of it: it’s a mixed bag with a lot of positive bits, and some terrifying bits, and the core message is that you’re supposed to be thinking about both and not trying to oversimplify things.
What would moral/social progress actually look like?
This seems like a good place to mention Dath Ilan, Eliezer’s fictional* universe which is at a much higher level of moral/social progress, and the LessWrong Coordination/Cooperation tag, which has some research pointing in that general direction.
What does XR think about the large numbers of people who don’t appreciate progress, or actively oppose it?
I don’t think I know enough to speak about the XR community broadly here, but as for me personally: mostly frustrated that their thinking isn’t granular enough. There’s a huge gulf between saying “social media is toxic” and saying “it is toxic for the closest thing to a downvote button to be reply/share”, and I try to tune out/unfollow the people whose writings say things closer to the former.

jimrandomh May 8, 2021, 5:41 PM
14 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Being Vocal About What Works
I think the common factor, among forms of advice that people are hesitant to give, is that they involve some risk. So if, for example, I recommend a supplement and it causes a health problem, or I recommend a stock and it crashes, there’s some worry about blame. If the supplement helps, or the stock rises, there’s some possibility of getting credit; but, in typical social relationships, the risk of blame is a larger concern than the possibility of credit, which makes people more than optimally hesitant.