Larks

• LarksJan 6, 2025, 2:17 PM

  8 points

  2 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Nathan Young’s Shortform

  I don’t know whether such people are going around dming everyone like this.

  Presumably not, as most people are not going around creating crime prediction markets that dramatically raise the salience of an implicit accusation. From their point of view I can see their response as being extremely restrained—you are making probabilistic public accusations that will predictably make them look bad, no matter how low the market price, and they’re not responding publicly at all.

• LarksJan 4, 2025, 8:12 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Prefer­ence Inversion

  I’d like to better understand your criteria for relevance.

  There was some mental process that lead you to think this was good content to share on the EA forum. What this was was (at least to me, and I suspect to other readers) very opaque—so I suggest you explicitly mention it.

  A good example is this post. It also introduces a topic with no explicit action items and doesn’t provide ‘direct factual support for current EA initiatives’. But it is pretty clear why it might be relevant to EA work, and the author explicitly included a section gesturing at the reasons to make it clear.

  Are you suggesting that EA relevance requires either explicit action items or direct factual support for current EA initiatives?

  No I am not.

• LarksJan 4, 2025, 5:57 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Prefer­ence Inversion

  I agree that not everything needs to supply random marginal facts about malaria. But at the same time I think concrete examples are useful to keep things grounded, and I think it’s reasonable to adopt a policy of ‘not relevant to EA until at least some evidence to the contrary is provided’. Apparently the OP does have some relevance in mind:

  This matters because a lot of EA work involves studying revealed preferences in contexts with strong power dynamics (development economics, animal welfare, etc). If we miss these dynamics, we risk optimizing for the same coercive equilibria we’re trying to fix.

  I feel like it would have been good to spend like half the post on this! Maybe I am just being dumb but it is genuinely unclear to me what preference falsification the OP is worried about with animal welfare. Without this the post seems to be written as a long response to a question about sex that as far as I can tell no-one on the forum asked.

• LarksJan 4, 2025, 5:46 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Guive’s comment on: What pre­dic­tions from the­o­ret­i­cal AI Safety re­search have been con­firmed by em­piri­cal work?

  Conversations people have with un-RLHF’d models.

• LarksJan 3, 2025, 3:58 AM

  3 points

  1 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Prefer­ence Inversion

  Yup, I understand the general concept of preference falsification. My question is about the specific application. I think it would be helpful if you had a concrete example of where this would be relevant for e.g. malaria bednets or factory farming?

• LarksJan 2, 2025, 7:17 PM

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Prefer­ence Inversion

  Thanks for sharing this. Perhaps you could explain the relevance to effective altruism a bit more explicitly?

• LarksDec 30, 2024, 1:42 AM

  13 points

  2 ∶ 1

  on: What pre­dic­tions from the­o­ret­i­cal AI Safety re­search have been con­firmed by em­piri­cal work?

  That mindspace is large and AIs are really weird.

• LarksDec 30, 2024, 1:40 AM

  5 points

  3 ∶ 1

  on: What pre­dic­tions from the­o­ret­i­cal AI Safety re­search have been con­firmed by em­piri­cal work?

  That it is possible to make smarter than human AIs and that this is The Issue.

• LarksDec 30, 2024, 1:40 AM

  15 points

  3 ∶ 1

  on: What pre­dic­tions from the­o­ret­i­cal AI Safety re­search have been con­firmed by em­piri­cal work?

  That sufficiently intelligent AIs will not ‘automatically’ be moral (e.g. the behaviour of un-RLHF’d models).

• LarksDec 30, 2024, 1:30 AM

  19 points

  6 ∶ 1

  on: What pre­dic­tions from the­o­ret­i­cal AI Safety re­search have been con­firmed by em­piri­cal work?

  That people will choose to let the AI out of the box.

• LarksDec 16, 2024, 10:38 PM

  4 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: JWS 🔸’s comment on: Jan_Kul­veit’s Quick takes

  since criticisms of EA also come with the ‘Community’ tag attached

  This seems not straightforwardly true to me—or at least it shouldn’t be? Criticisms of the EA community should be community-tagged, but criticisms of EA ideas should not be.

• LarksDec 15, 2024, 10:16 PM

  16 points

  10 ∶ 0

  in reply to: titotal’s comment on: tito­tal’s Quick takes

  This is a guy who got back surgery that was covered by his health insurance and then murdered the CEO of a different health insurance company. While EAs are always keen to self-flagellate over any possible bad thing that might have some tangential connection, I really think this one can be categorized under ‘crazy’ and ‘psychedelics’. To the extent he was motivated by ideology it doesn’t seem to be EA—the slogan he carved onto the bullet casings was a general anti-capitalist anti-insurance one.

• LarksDec 14, 2024, 6:26 PM

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: The class blindspot in pri­ori­tiz­ing smok­ing-re­lated illness

  Surely smokers are on average richer than malaria victims? No-one in the west is getting Malaria, but many do smoke, and smokers need at least enough money to buy cigarettes. And smokers chose to smoke; people aren’t choosing to get malaria.

  unlike many problems the EA community grapples with, we already know how to help them

  It’s strange you make this post about comparing to malaria. Surely we actually have a better sense of how to fight malaria (e.g. bednets, medicine) than we do smoking (where even with good support quitting can be difficult)?

• LarksDec 6, 2024, 8:07 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: JJ Hepburn’s comment on: JJ Hep­burn’s Shortform

  Even considering that you could presumably choose not to apply? (I guess you think it is bad in a systematically surprising way).

• LarksDec 6, 2024, 8:06 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Kaspar Brandner’s comment on: Con­sider grant­ing AIs freedom

  Presumably you would want to give them negative rights (contracts, own property, not being murdered etc.) only, and not positive rights (healthcare, housing, cash). Which makes sense to me as the latter are much more philosophically dubious anyway.

• LarksDec 3, 2024, 1:41 AM

  0 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Lauren Gilbert’s comment on: The Mariel Boatlift

  So technically, they received some aid—I’ll edit accordingly, thanks for the flag—but considerably less than most refugees.

  There is a huge difference between ’they were at some times not approved for this specific type of aid” and “work or starve”. There is no way that the US in the 1980s would tolerate mass starvation like this—even if the federal government hadn’t stepped in, the individual states, churches, charities, families etc. would not have allowed that to occur.

  To quote Billy and Packard 2020...

  If you read the prior sentence in that article, you will see they are basically assuming the negative selection to be true, and don’t engage with my argument that positive selection effects also existed at all:

  Accounting for migrant selection lies outside the scope of our project and the available data.

  I don’t think the fact that some were eventually deported shows very much. I’m not denying that some of them were criminals—I’m just claiming that there are also significant positive selection effects. Since you’re not saying that they were all eventually deported, and I’m not saying that every single migrant was a great person, I don’t think the mere fact that some were deported is very strong evidence either way.

  That’s their… headline result?

  No, it is not. You discussed whether refugees were “particularly likely to commit crimes”. This is a simple statistic—you take crimes committed and divide by population. It is the statistic shown in the chart I included. As far as I am aware, basically every source agrees that this wave of refugees commit crimes at well above the rates of natives.

  In contrast, my understanding is the Huang and Kvasnicka paper you quoted do a series of regressions to try to establish whether the scale of immigration changed the amount of crimes that refugees committed. This is a different question. It could (hypothetically) be the case that refugees were committing crimes at a very high rate, and then this fell in 2015 but was still higher than the native rate—if this was the case then this paper would show the opposite result to what we are discussing.

  I am also very skeptical of the paper because the garden of branching paths issue seems so large—they declined to publish simple statistics and opted for much more complicated regressions instead which matched the results they clearly ideologically favoured—but this is beside the point because, even if their paper had no issues, it simply answers a different question.

  It’s possible I’ve misunderstood this issue. If that’s the case I’d love to see the explanation for the difference between this paper’s complex methodology and the simple approaches which overwhelmingly suggest the opposite.

• LarksDec 2, 2024, 2:37 AM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: The Mariel Boatlift

  Marielitos were also ineligible for government assistance

  Are you sure this is true? I think both state and federal government provided a lot of aid, as is typical for refugees. See for example President Carter’s speech:

  This legislation means that $100 million will immediately be available to the communities of Florida and a few other States to help reimburse them for expenses involved in the recent influx of people from Cuba and from Haiti.

  ...
  
  Congress has already appropriated $100 million in reimbursements for cash and medical assistance and social services provided to these newcomers; this amendment makes that money available.

  I am also skeptical of this inference you make:

  Especially unusually, Mariel immigrants were even sometimes negatively selected—people Castro wanted to get rid of

  Castro was a communist dictator. While some of the people leaving I would expect to be criminals, I would also expect those who were opposed to communism and wanted valued the opportunities and freedoms offered by capitalism to be highly represented. If you wanted to work hard and better yourself, why would you not want to move from Cuba to the US? I would expect them to be significantly positively skewed, especially compared to recent refugees into Europe, who have access to generous government benefits.

  I am also confused by your claim here:

  In Germany, refugees were not particularly likely to commit crimes against Germans

  Despite looking through the paper you cite (and consulting Notebook LM), I could not actually find this comparison in it. It is clear the authors have the data to calculate it—they have crimes tagged by whether they were committed by a refugee or not—but curiously they seem to have forgotten to actually calculate the ratio, instead opting only to show more complicated regression results whose conclusions, I imagine, were more agreeable to them.

  However, the basic statistics are easily available elsewhere, despite the German state’s attempts to suppress reporting on the subject. Even the BBC publishes them:

  

• LarksNov 27, 2024, 4:57 PM

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: huw’s comment on: huw’s Quick takes

  It seems like this should be normalized by total population. If a country only had one depressed dude, and he was untreated, I would say this is a small gap, but the map as it is would suggest it was the largest possible gap. Conversely, if every single person in the country was depressed, and only 33% were treated, this map would suggest the gap was very small.

Gw­ern on cre­at­ing your own AI race and China’s Fast Fol­lower strat­egy.

• LarksNov 21, 2024, 5:21 AM

  8 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Where I Am Donat­ing in 2024

  I remember removing an org entirely because they complained, though in that case they claimed they didn’t have enough time to engage with me (rather than the opposite). It’s also possible there are other cases I have forgotten. To your point, I have no objections to Michael’s “make me overly concerned about being nice” argument which I do think is true.