Linch

• Linch 20 Jan 2021 23:56 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Chi’s comment on: Chi’s Shortform

  I think within EA, people should report their accurate levels of confidence, which in some cultures and situations will come across as underconfident and in other cultures and situations will come across as overconfident.
  
  I’m not sure what the practical solution is to this level of precision bleeding outside of EA; I definitely felt like there were times where I was socially penalized for trying to be accurate in situations where accuracy was implicitly not called for. If I was smarter/​more socially savvy the “obvious” right call would be to quickly codeswitch between different contexts, but in practice I’ve found it quite hard.

  ___
  
  Separate from the semantics used, I agree there is a real issue where some people are systematically underconfident or overconfident relative to reality, and this hurts their ability to believe true things or achieve their goals in the long run. Unfortunately this plausibly correlates with demographic differences (eg women on average less confident than men, Asians on average less confident than Caucasians), which seems worth correcting for if possible.

• Linch 20 Jan 2021 19:36 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Ramiro’s comment on: What is go­ing on in the world?

  Thanks for your comment!

  I agree. But you see, in some population dynamics, variation is correlated with increased risk of extinction.

  I think I don’t follow your point. If I understand correctly, the linked paper (at least from the abstract, I have not read it) talks about population-size variation, which has an intuitive/​near-tautological relationship with increased risk of extinction, rather than variation overall.

  That might be precisely part of the problem.

  Sorry can you specify more what the problem is? If you mean that the problem is an inefficient distribution of limited resources, I agree that it’s morally bad that I have access to a number of luxuries while others starve, and the former is casually upstream of the latter. However, in the long run we can only get maybe 1-2 orders of magnitude gains from a more equitable distribution of resources globally (though some rich individuals/​gov’ts can create more good than that by redistributing their own resources), but we can get much more through other ways to create more stuff/​better experiences.

  We are just starting to be seriously concerned about the externalities of this increase in

  consumption

  Who’s this “we?” :P
  
  

• Linch 20 Jan 2021 8:30 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Ben_West’s comment on: Train­ing Bot­tle­necks in EA (pro­fes­sional skills)

  One explanation for this is that organization-specific knowledge … is valuable, but general-purpose skills aren’t as valuable

  I’ve also heard the explanation that firms are strongly incentivized to teach organization-specific knowledge but not general-purpose skills, because the former increases employee efficacy in the organization but the latter makes them more hirable at other organizations.
  
  This is obviously theoretically true but I haven’t seen the literature on the effect size/​am unclear how big an issue this is in practice.

• Linch 19 Jan 2021 8:04 UTC

  4 points

  on: What is go­ing on in the world?

  I’m curious if there’s a point about energy use that’s large enough to be added to the list. Intuitively I think no (for the same reason that climate change doesn’t seem as important as the above points), but on the scale of centuries, the story of humanity is intertwined with the story of energy use, so perhaps on an outside view this is just actually really underrated and important.

• Linch 19 Jan 2021 8:01 UTC

  14 points

  on: What is go­ing on in the world?

  We (most humans in most of the world) lived or are living in a golden age, with more material prosperity and better physical health* than ever before. 2020 was shitty, and the second derivative might be negative, but the first derivative still looks clearly positive on the timescale of decades, as well as a (measured from history, not counterfactual) really high baseline. On a personal level, my consumption is maybe 2 orders of magnitude higher than that of my grandparents at my age(might become closer to 3 if I was less EA). So I’d be interested in adding a few sentences like:

  • For the first time in recorded history, the vast majority of humans are much richer than their ancestors.

  • Even in the midst of a raging pandemic, human deaths from infectious disease still account for less than ¹⁄₃ of all deaths.

  • People have access to more and better information than ever before.

  I think as EAs, it’s easy to have a pretty negative view of the world (because we want to fix on what we can fix, and also pay attention to a lot of things we currently can’t fix in the hopes that one day we can figure out what to fix later), but obviously there is still a lot of good in the world (and there might be much more to come), and it might be valuable to have concrete reminders of what we ought to cherish and protect.

  * I think it’s plausible/​likely that we’re emotionally and intellectually healthier as well, but this case is more tenuous.

• Linch 17 Jan 2021 20:30 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: richard_ngo’s comment on: Clar­ify­ing the core of Effec­tive Altruism

  I think you’re saying that my word choice is unusual here for commonsensical intuitions, but I don’t think it is? Tennis is an unusually objective field, with clear metrics and a well-defined competitive system.
  
  When somebody says “I think Barack Obama (or your preferred presidential candidate) is the best man to be president” I highly doubt that they literally mean there’s a >50% chance that of all living America-born citizens >35 years of age, this person will be better at governing the US than everybody else.
  
  Similarly, when somebody says “X is the best fiction author,” I doubt they are expressing >50% credence that of all humans who have ever told a story, X told the best fiction stories.
  
  The reference class is the same as the field. Sorry I was clear. But like you said, there are >7 billion people, so “specific reference member” means something very different than “field overall.”

• Linch 17 Jan 2021 16:35 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: richard_ngo’s comment on: Clar­ify­ing the core of Effec­tive Altruism

  I guess when I think “best action to do” the normative part of the claim is something about the local map rather than the territory or the global map. I think this has two parts:
  
  1) When I say “X is the best bet” I meant that my subjective probability P(X is best) > P(any specific other reference member). I’m not actually betting it against “the field” or claiming P(X is best) > 0.5!
  
  2) If I believe that X is the best bet in the sense of highest probability, of course if I was smarter and/​or had more information my assigned probabilities will likely change.

• Linch 16 Jan 2021 21:04 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: richard_ngo’s comment on: What ac­tu­ally is the ar­gu­ment for effec­tive al­tru­ism?

  On one hand, it might be the case that the actions which are most cost-effective at doing good actually do very little good, but are also very cheap (e.g. see this post by Hanson). Alternatively, maybe the most cost-effective actions are absurdly expensive, so that knowing what they are doesn’t help us.

  I think the first argument can be rescued by including search costs in the “cost” definition. I agree that the second one cannot be, and is a serious issue with this phrasing.

• Linch 16 Jan 2021 21:01 UTC

  4 points

  on: Clar­ify­ing the core of Effec­tive Altruism

  Thanks for the post! I think disambiguating “EA as trajectory change” and “EA as hits-based giving” is particularly valuable for me.

  In the face of radical uncertainty about the future, it seems hard to ever justifiably claim that one course of action is the “best thing to do”, rather than just a very good thing to do.

  I’m confused by this. I assume that the “best thing to do” phrase is used ex ante rather than ex post. Perhaps you’re using the word “justifiably” to mean something more technical/​philosophical than what the common language meaning is?

RP Work Trial Out­put: How to Pri­ori­tize Anti-Aging Pri­ori­ti­za­tion—A Light Investigation

• Linch 10 Jan 2021 20:32 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: The Folly of “EAs Should”

  It has a negative effect on the local theater, but hopefully a positive effect on the counterfactual recipients of that money.

• Linch 10 Jan 2021 20:32 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: The Folly of “EAs Should”

  I’m generally leery of putting words in other people’s mouths, but perhaps people are using “bad advice” to mean different things, or at least have different central examples in mind.
  
  There’s at least 3 possible interpretations of what “bad advice” can mean here:
  
  A. Advice that, if some fraction of people are compelled to follow it across the board, can predictably lead to worse outcomes than if the advice isn’t followed.

  B. Advice that, if followed by people likely to follow such advice, can predictably lead to worse outcomes than if the advice isn’t followed.

  C. Words that can be in some sense considered “advice” that have negative outcomes/​emotional affect upon hearing these words, regardless of whether such advice is actually followed.

  Consider the following pieces of “advice”:

  1. You should self-treat covid-19 with homeopathy.

  2. You should eat raw lead nails.

  #1 will be considered “bad advice” in all 3 interpretations (it will be bad if everybody treats covid-19 with homepathy(A), it will be bad if people especially susceptible to homeopathic messaging treat covid-19 with homeopathy(B), and also I will negatively judge someone for recommending self treatment with homeopathy(C)).
  
  #2 is only “bad advice” in at most 2 of the interpretations (forcibly eating raw lead nails is bad(A), but realistically I don’t expect anybody to listen to such “recommendations” ( B), and this advice is so obviously absurd that context will determine whether I’d be upset about this suggestion (C)).
  
  In context here, if Habryka (and for that matter me) doesn’t know any EA ex-doctors who regret no longer being a doctor (whereas he has positive examples of EA ex-doctors who do not regret this), this is strong evidence that telling people to not be doctors is good advice under interpretation B*, and moderate-weak evidence that it’s good advice under interpretation A.
  
  (I was mostly reading “bad advice” in the context of B and maybe A when I first read these comments).
  
  However, if David/​Khorton interpret “bad advice” to mean something closer to C, then it makes more sense why not knowing a single person harmed by following such advice is not a lot of evidence for whether the advice is actually good or bad.

  
  * I suppose you can posit a selection-effected world where there’s a large “dark matter” of former EAs/​former doctors who quit the medical profession, regretted that choice, and then quit EA in disgust. This claim is not insane to me, but will not be where I place the balance of my probabilities.

• Linch 8 Jan 2021 11:52 UTC

  27 points

  on: Strong Longter­mism, Ir­refutabil­ity, and Mo­ral Progress

  My credence could be that working on AI safety will reduce existential risk by 5% and yours could be 10^-19%, and there’s no way to discriminate between them.

  We can look at their track record on other questions, and see how reliably (or otherwise) different people’s predictions track reality.
  
  I agree that below a certain level (certainly by 10^-19, and possibly as high as 10^-3) direct calibration-in-practice becomes somewhat meaningless. But we should be pretty suspicious of people claiming extremely accurate probabilities at the 10^-10 mark if they aren’t even accurate at the 10^-1 mark.

  In general I’m not a fan of this particular form of epistemic anarchy where people say that they can’t know anything with enough precision under uncertainty to give numbers, and then act as if their verbal non-numeric intuitions are enough to carry them through consistently making accurate decisions.

  It’s easy to lie (including to yourself) with numbers, but it’s even easier to lie without them.

• Linch 7 Jan 2021 10:01 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Max_Daniel’s comment on: My mis­takes on the path to impact

  Apologies for the long delay in response, feel free to not reply if you’re busy.

  Hmm I still think we have a substantive rather than framing disagreement (though I think it is likely that our disagreements aren’t large).

  This is because very loosely speaking I expect not deferring to often be better if the stakes are concentrated on oneself and more deference to be better if one’s own direct stake is small. I used a decision with large effects on others largely because then it’s not plausible that you yourself are affected by a similar amount; but it would also apply to a decision with zero effect on yourself and a small effect on others. Conversely, it would not apply to a decision that is very important to yourself (e.g. something affecting your whole career trajectory).

  Perhaps this heuristic is really useful for a lot of questions you’re considering. I’m reminded of AGB’s great quote:

  There are enough individual and practical considerations here (in both directions) that in many situations the actual thing I would advocate for is something like “work out what you would do with both approaches, check against results ‘without fear or favour’, and move towards whatever method is working best for you”.

  For me personally and the specific questions I’ve considered, I think considering whether/​how much to defer to by dividing into buckets of “how much it affects myself or others” is certainly a pretty useful heuristic in the absence of better heuristics, but it’s mostly superseded by a different decomposition:

  1. Epistemic—In a context-sensitive manner, do we expect greater or lower deference in this particular situation to lead to more accurate beliefs.

  2. Role expectations* -- Whether the explicit and implicit social expectations on the role you’re assuming privilege deference or independence.

  So I think a big/​main reason it’s bad to defer completely to others (say 80k) on your own career reasons is epistemic: you have so much thought and local knowledge about your own situation that your prior should very strongly be against others having better all-things-considered views on your career choice than you do. I think this is more crux-y for me than how much your career trajectory affects yourself vs others (at any rate hopefully as EAs our career trajectories affect many others anyway!).
  
  On the other hand, I think my Cochrane review example above is a good epistemic example of deference. even though my dental hygiene practices mainly affect myself and not others (perhaps my past and future partners may disagree), I contend it’s better to defer to the meta-analysis over my own independent analysis in this particular facet of my personal life.

  The other main (non-epistemic) lens I’d use to privilege greater or lower humility is whether the explicit and implicit social expectations privilege deference or independence. For example, we’d generally** prefer government bureaucrats in most situations to implement policies, rather than making unprincipled exceptions based on private judgements. This will often look superficially similar to “how much this affects myself or others.”

  An example of a dissimilarity is when someone filling out a survey. This is a situation where approximately all of the costs and benefits are borne by other people. So if you have a minority opinion on a topic, it may seem like the epistemically humble-and-correct action is to fill out the poll according to what you believe the majority to think (or alternatively, fill it out with the answer that you privately think is on the margin more conducive to advancing your values).
  
  But in all likelihood, such a policy is one-thought-too-many, and in almost all situations it’d be more prudent to fill out public anonymous polls/​surveys with what you actually believe.

  I agree that one should act such that one’s all-things-considered view is that one is making the best decision (the way I understand that statement it’s basically a tautology).

  Agreed, though I mention this because in discussions of epistemic humility-in-practice, it’s very easy to accidentally do double-counting.

  
  *I don’t like this phrase, happy to use a better one.
  
  **I’m aware that there are exceptions, including during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

• Linch 6 Jan 2021 18:45 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: AGB’s comment on: How mod­est should you be?

  Thanks for the compliment!

  check against results ‘without fear or favour’, and move towards whatever method is working best for you.
  

  Yeah that makes sense! I think this is a generally good approach to epistemics/​life.

• Linch 5 Jan 2021 1:05 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Halstead’s comment on: How mod­est should you be?

  Thanks for the reply! One thing you and AGB reminded me of that my original comment elided over is that some of these personal and “practical” considerations apply in both directions. For example for #4 there are many/​most cases where understanding expert consensus is easier rather than harder than coming up with your own judgment.
  
  It’d perhaps be interesting if people produced a list of the most important/​common practical considerations in either direction, though ofc much of that will be specific to the individual/​subject matter/​specific situation.

• Linch 4 Jan 2021 21:23 UTC

  7 points

  on: In­som­nia: a promis­ing cure

  Some people in the comments were recommending Why We Sleep. People may be interested in this update by Alexey Guzey:
  
  Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors
  
  Here’s an excerpt:
  

  Any book of Why We Sleep’s length is bound to contain some factual errors. Therefore, to avoid potential concerns about cherry-picking the few inaccuracies scattered throughout, in this essay, I’m going to highlight the five most egregious scientific and factual errors Walker makes in Chapter 1 of the book. This chapter contains 10 pages and constitutes less than 4% of the book by the total word count.

  [...]

  
  No, two-thirds of adults in developed nations do not fail to obtain the recommended amount of sleep

  Suppose that you recommend that adults sleep 7-9 hours per night.

  1. then, someone learns (a) that roughly 40% of people sleep less than 7 hours, roughly 25% sleep 7 hours, and roughly 35% sleep 8 hours or more, meaning that a bit over one-third of people sleep less than you recommend Linked data is for the US but it appears (a) that other developed countries have very similar sleep habits.

  2. then they look at your recommendation and say that you recommended an average of 8 hours of sleep per night.

  3. then they say that you recommended 8 hours of sleep per night

  4. then they say that two-thirds of people sleep less than the 8 hours you recommended

  Would this be a fair representation of your position and of the data or would this be misleading?

  This is literally what Walker does in his book. On page 3, in the very first paragraph of Chapter 1, Walker writes:

  Two-thirds of adults throughout all developed nations fail to obtain the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep.

  In the footnote to this sentence he writes:

  The World Health Organization and the National Sleep Foundation both stipulate an average of eight hours of sleep per night for adults.

  Here are the National Sleep Foundation’s sleep recommendations (a) announced in 2015:

  Adults (26-64): Sleep range did not change and remains 7-9 hours

  Here are the World Health Organization’s sleep recommendations:

  ‎

  The quote is empty because the WHO does not stipulate how much an adult should sleep anywhere. I don’t know where Walker got this information.

  
  The rest of the post is written in a similarly exasperated and exhaustive nature, patiently taking down Walker’s unfounded claims page by page. (Again, all of this is just in Chapter 1).

  While I have not individually vetted the claims in Guzey’s blog post, on face value it seems reasonably well-researched and careful, certainly more so than the book it was critiquing. There are also followups on the StatModelling blog by Andrew Gelman, a famous Bayesian statistician and blogger.
  
  Note that Guzey’s critique and the followups on Gelman’s blog came out after this forum post and most of the associated comments were published, and it will be somewhat unfair to blame commentators for not being aware of the scientific and factual errors of an acclaimed/​professed “sleep scientist.”

• Linch 2 Jan 2021 12:28 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: alexrjl’s comment on: Fore­casts about EA or­gani­sa­tions which are cur­rently on Me­tac­u­lus.

  Not quite at the point where I think additional work is helpful (eg the question operationalization stage), but want to flag that I and others at Rethink are actively excited about incorporating more forecasting in our workflow, and it’s plausible that the format here (public Metaculus questions about organization metrics) would be relevant for us!

• Linch 31 Dec 2020 0:45 UTC

  34 points

  on: How mod­est should you be?

  This isn’t directly related to your point, but I think there are a number of practical issues with most attempts at epistemic modesty/​deference, that theoretical approaches like this one do not adequately account for.
  
  1) Misunderstanding of what experts actually mean. It is often easier to defer to a stereotype in your head than to fully understand an expert’s views, or a simple approximation thereof.
  
  Dan Luu gives the example of SV investors who “defer” to economists on the issue of discrimination in competitive markets without actually understanding (or perhaps reading) the relevant papers.
  
  In some of those cases, it’s plausible that you’d do better trusting the evidence of your own eyes/​intuition over your attempts to understand experts.
  
  2) Misidentifying the right experts. In the US, it seems like the educated public roughly believes that “anybody with a medical doctorate” is approximately the relevant expert class on questions as diverse as nutrition, the fluid dynamics of indoor air flow (if the airflow happens to carry viruses), and the optimal allocation of limited (medical) resources.
  
  More generally, people often default to the closest high-status group/​expert to them, without accounting for whether that group/​expert is epistemically superior to other experts slightly further away in space or time.

  2a) Immodest modesty.* As a specific case/​extension of this, when someone identifies an apparent expert or community of experts to defer to, they risk (incorrectly) believing that they have deference (on this particular topic) “figured out” and thus choose not to update on either object- or meta- level evidence that they did not correctly identify the relevant experts. The issue may be exacerbated beyond “normal” cases of immodesty, if there’s a sufficiently high conviction that you are being epistemically modest!
  
  3) Information lag. Obviously any information you receive is to some degree or another from the past, and has the risk of being outdated. Of course, this lag happens for all evidence you have. At the most trivial level, even sensory experience isn’t really in real-time. But I think it should be reasonable to assume that attempts to read expert claims/​consensus is disproportionately likely to have a significant lag problem, compared to your own present evaluations of the object-level arguments.
  
  4) Computational complexity in understanding the consensus. Trying to understand the academic consensus (or lack thereof) from the outside might be very difficult, to the point where establishing your own understanding from a different vantage point might be less time-consuming. Unlike 1), this presupposes that you are able to correctly understand/​infer what the experts mean, just that it might not be worth the time to do so.
  
  5) Community issues with groupthink/​difficulty in separating out beliefs from action. In an ideal world, we make our independent assessments of a situation, report it to the community, in what Kant[1] calls the “public (scholarly) use of reason” and then defer to an all-things-considered epistemically modest view when we act on our beliefs in our private role as citizens.
  
  However, in practice I think it’s plausibly difficult to separate out what you personally believe from what you feel compelled to act on. One potential issue with this is that a community that’s overly epistemically deferential will plausibly have less variation, and lower affordance for making mistakes.
  

  --
  
  *As a special case of that, people may be unusually bad at identifying the right experts when said experts happen to agree with their initial biases, either on the object-level or for meta-level reasons uncorrelated with truth (eg use similar diction, have similar cultural backgrounds, etc)
  
  [1] ha!

  What links here?

  • Linch's comment on Linch’s Shortform by Linch (LessWrong; 1 Jan 2021 6:41 UTC; 7 points)
  • Linch's comment on My mis­takes on the path to impact by Denise_Melchin (7 Jan 2021 10:01 UTC; 4 points)

• Linch 25 Dec 2020 1:31 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: sindirella’s comment on: Why I’m Donat­ing to Giv­ing Green This Year

  In that case I’m sorry I missed it! Do you think I should delete my comment?