Linch

Karma: 25,682

Linch 16 Jul 2024 13:48 UTC
3 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: harfe’s comment on: Most smart and skilled people are outside of the EA/rationalist community: an analysis
The former. I think it should be fairly intuitive if you think about the shape of the distribution you’re drawing from. Here’s the code, courtesy of Claude 3.5. [edit: deleted the quote block with the code because of aesthetics, link should still work].

Linch 15 Jul 2024 11:10 UTC
7 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: The Precipice Revisited
I think Toby’s use of “evenly split” is a bit of a stretch in 2024 with the information available, but lab leak is definitely still plausible. To quote Scott in the review:
Fourth, for the first time it made me see the coronavirus as one of God’s biggest and funniest jokes. Think about it. Either a zoonotic virus crossed over to humans fifteen miles from the biggest coronavirus laboratory in the Eastern Hemisphere. Or a lab leak virus first rose to public attention right near a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market. Either way is one of the century’s biggest coincidences, designed by some cosmic joker who wanted to keep the debate [...] acrimonious for years to come.
I think lab leak is now a minority position among people who looked into it, but it’s not exactly a fringe view. I would guess at least some US intelligence agencies still think lab leak is more likely than not, for example.

Linch 14 Jul 2024 14:30 UTC
5 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: RobertM’s comment on: Most smart and skilled people are outside of the EA/rationalist community: an analysis
And, like, idk, man. 130 is pretty smart but not “famous for their public intellectual output” level smart.
Yeah “2 sds just isn’t that big a deal” seems like an obvious hypothesis here (“People might over-estimate how smart they are” is, of course, another likely hypothesis).

Also of course OP was being overly generous by assuming that it’s a normal distribution centered around 128. If you take a bunch of random samples of a normal distribution, and only look at subsamples with median 2 sds out, in approximately ~0 subsamples will you find it equally likely to see + 0 sds and +4 sds.

Linch 11 Jul 2024 13:55 UTC
11 points
2 ∶ 0
on: On the Value of Advancing Progress
Thank you for the article! I’ve been skeptical of the general arguments for progress (from a LT perspective) for several years but never managed to articulate a model quite as simple/clear as yours.
For instance, they might be able to lengthen our future by bringing forward the moment we develop technologies to protect us from natural threats to our survival. This is an intriguing idea, but there are challenges to getting it to work: especially since there isn’t actually much natural extinction risk for progress to reduce, whereas progress appears to be introducing larger anthropogenic risks
...
There might be other claims about the value of progress that are unaffected. For example, these considerations don’t directly undermine the argument that progress is better than stasis, and thus that if progress is fragile, we need to protect it. That may be true even if humanity does eventually bring about its own end, and even if our progress brings it about sooner.
When I’ve had these debates with people before, the most compelling argument for me (other than progress being good under a wide range of commonsensical assumptions + moral/epistemic uncertainty) is a combination of these arguments plus a few subtleties. It goes something like this:
1. Progress isn’t guaranteed
2. It’s not actually very plausible/viable to maintain a society that’s ~flat, in practice you’re either going forwards or backwards.
3. Alternatively, people paint a Red Queen story where work towards advancement is necessary to fight the natural forces of decline. If you (speaking broadly) don’t meaningfully advance, civilizational decline will set in, likely in the span of mere decades or centuries
  1. Sometimes people point to specific issues, eg institiutional rot in specific societies. Or global demographic decline which need to be countered by either greater per-capita productivity or some other way of creating more minds (most saliently via AGI, though maybe you can also do artificial wombs or something)
4. Regression makes humanity more vulnerable to both exogenous risks (supervolcanoes etc) and endogenous risks (superweapon wars, mass ideological capture by suicidal memes, fertility crisis)
  1. (relatedly, subarguments here about why rebuilding is not guaranteed)
5. Therefore we need to advance society (technologically, economically, maybe in other ways) to survive, at least until the point where we have a stable society that doesn’t need to keep advancing to stay safe.
This set of arguments only establishes that undifferentiated progress is better than no progress. They do not by themselves directly argue against differential technological progress. However, people who ~roughly believe the above set of arguments will probably say that differential technological progress (or differential progress in general) is a good idea in theory but not realistic except for a handful of exceptions (like banning certain forms of gain-of-function research in virology). For example, they might point to Hayekian difficulties with central planning and argue that in many ways differential technological progress is even more difficult than the traditional issues that attempted central planners have faced.
On balance, I did not find their arguments overall convincing but it’s pretty subtle and I don’t currently think the case against “undifferentiated progress is exceptionally good” is a slam dunk^[1], like I did a few years ago.
1. ^
  In absolute terms. I think there’s a stronger case that marginal work on preventing x-risk is much more valuable in expectation. Though that case is not extremely robust because of similar sign-error issues that plague attempted x-risk prevention work.

Linch 10 Jul 2024 0:55 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: utilistrutil’s comment on: A Case for Superhuman Governance, using AI
This sounds awesome at first blush, would love to see it battle-tested.

Linch 9 Jul 2024 23:17 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: huw’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform
I edited my comment for clarity.

Linch 9 Jul 2024 22:12 UTC
50 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Linch’s Shortform
The recently released 2024 Republican platform said they’ll repeal the recent White House Executive Order on AI, which many in this community thought is a necessary first step to make future AI progress more safe/secure. This seems bad.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) We will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology. In its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.
From https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24795758/read-the-2024-republican-party-platform.pdf, see bottom of pg 9.

Linch 9 Jul 2024 21:56 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Seth Ariel Green’s comment on: Extraordinary cost-effectiveness analyses call for supporting theory
Hmm I guess I wouldn’t be that surprised if we observed similar levels of what you call “dysfunction” in the US. Earlier you asked:
Framed differently, what would it take for you to accept the same thing for yourself—that an organization is hundreds of times better at helping you than you are at helping yourself?
I guess the intuitive plausibility of this is rather low (or perhaps I have an overly high opinion of myself) if the problem is framed as one of my own rationality, but I can much more easily buy that there are collective action problems that benefit “people like me” at >100x the costs.

Linch 2 Jul 2024 2:18 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Animal Welfare Fund: Payout recommendations from May 2022 to March 2024
Hi Jason, great question! You and/or potential donors and/or potential grantees can look at the marginal grants writeup ^[1]that Kieran and Neil put together last December. I don’t think the bar has changed significantly in the last 6 months, though any AWF fund manager is free to correct me.
To answer your exact question, I don’t have a quantitative sense of how much better the highlighted grants are, compared to the marginal grants. I don’t think it’s strictly necessary here to have a cardinal ranking, because (as you’ve identified) exactly where the marginal grants are matters noticeably more than the number of times the best grants are better than the marginal ones.
1. ^
  (click through to the link, the headline is for a fundraising post but the section I linked detailed marginal grants).

Linch 27 Jun 2024 22:48 UTC
7 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Distancing EA from rationality is foolish
On LW, I thought comments here were very poor, with a few half-exceptions. It wasn’t even a controversial topic!
On EAF, I pragmatically am not that interested in either starting new fights, or relitigating past ones. I will say that making my comment here solely about kindness, rather than kindness and epistemics, was a tactical decision.

Linch 27 Jun 2024 13:24 UTC
9 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Animal Welfare Fund: Payout recommendations from May 2022 to March 2024
Would encourage others to apply in future too, 17% is a reasonably high acceptance rate so the application may well be worth the effort.
Definitely agree that more people should apply! And I think our non-desk rejected acceptance rate (27%) is more representative for the type of applications that forum readers are likely to send in (e.g., projects actually related to improving animal welfare for large numbers of animals).

Linch 27 Jun 2024 12:55 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 1
on: Extraordinary cost-effectiveness analyses call for supporting theory
Most of the interventions from Pure Earth is political, right? So I’d guess that #4 is correct. I think it should be relatively straightforward why rational selfish actors are not incentivized to make political interventions for their own interests:
- Suppose you have V voters. As V increases, the total benefit of a good political intervention grows proportionally.
- However, the benefit to each voter for the intervention succeeding remains constant, regardless of V.
- The probability of an individual vote changing the outcome decreases as V increases (roughly 1/V).
- From a selfish standpoint, as V grows larger, the incentive for an individual to be well-informed decreases.

Linch 27 Jun 2024 12:14 UTC
1 point
8 ∶ 8
in reply to: David Mathers’s comment on: Distancing EA from rationality is foolish
Eh, I agree with you that LW-style rationalists are far from sinless in this regard, but it’s hard to not notice that many people, including on EAF, seem to have a strong revealed preference for irrationality.
I’m not sure why; one guess I have is that people (subconsciously) correctly identify rational irrationality as the best strategy to come across as loyal to one’s tribe. I find this sad, but I don’t have a real answer here; the incentives are strong and point in the wrong direction.
In my ideal culture, everybody will be polite about it, but sloppy thinking will still be heavily censured, rather than rewarded.
(slightly feverish, apologies if I’m not making as much sense, ironically).

Animal Welfare Fund: Payout recommendations from May 2022 to March 2024

Linch26 Jun 2024 13:33 UTC

133 points

11 comments24 min readEA link

Linch 25 Jun 2024 23:25 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Remmelt’s comment on: Émile P. Torres’s history of dishonesty and harassment
The article is enough to change my mind, personally.

Linch 25 Jun 2024 12:11 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: gergo’s comment on: Long-Term Future Fund: March 2024 Payout recommendations
Thanks, edited! :)

Linch 25 Jun 2024 6:12 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ebenezer Dukakis’s comment on: H5N1 - thread for information sharing, planning, and action
Thanks for tracking this, I definitely think being aware of + extremely up-to-date on “novel pandemics” is one of the things that our community (~GCR-focused EAs) should have at least a few people working on, though it’s a hard thing to do without either under- or over- shooting.

(It’s possible these people already exist and are working quietly. In which case, great! I’m not sufficiently in touch with the space to know either way).

Linch 23 Jun 2024 9:32 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Long-Term Future Fund: March 2024 Payout recommendations
I agree! (They are not from Anthropic. I probably shouldn’t deanonymize further). :)

Linch 21 Jun 2024 11:17 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Guy Raveh’s comment on: Why so many “racists” at Manifest?
(I didn’t think your comment was primarily referring to them fwiw)

Linch 21 Jun 2024 10:10 UTC
121 points
25 ∶ 1
on: Why so many “racists” at Manifest?
A meta- norm I’d like commentators^[1] to have is to Be Kind, When Possible. Some subpoints that might be helpful for enacting what I believe to be the relevant norms:
- Try to understand/genuinely grapple with the awareness that you are talking to/about actual humans on the other side, not convenient abstractions/ideological punching bags.
  - For example, most saliently to me, the Manifest organizers aren’t an amorphous blob of bureaucratic institutions.
    They are ~3 specific people, all of whom are fairly young, new to organizing large events, and under a lot of stress as it is.
    Rachel in particular played a (the?) central role in organizing, despite being 7(?) months pregnant. Organizing a new, major multiday event under such conditions is stressful enough as it is, and I’m sure the Manifest team in general, and Rachel in particular, was hoping they can relax a bit at the end.
    It seems bad enough that a hit piece in the Guardian is written about them, but it’s worse when “their” community wants to pile on, etc.
  - I’m not saying that you shouldn’t criticize people. Criticism can be extremely valuable! But there are constructive, human, ways to criticize, and then there are...other ways.
- Try to make your critiques as minimally personal as possible. Engage with arguments, don’t attack individual people if at all possible.
  - For example, I really appreciate Isa’s comments. Judging by upvotes and karma, many other people did as well.
  - It’s reasonable if you disagree with her comments. But you can engage with them on the merits, rather than making comments personal, as some of the replies seem to.
  - Some of the replies implied that Isa said things they did not say. Some of the other replies implied that Isa’s critiques are borne out of projection or unnecessarily taking things personally
    On the object-level, I read her comments and I think that reading is just wrong. On the meta-level, even if that reading is correct, this is the type of thing that you should handle delicately, not harshly try to package it in an attack to make it harder to argue against you.
- Relatedly, try to have decent theory of mind.
  - People you argue with likely have different beliefs, values, and preferences from you. They are also likely to have different beliefs, values, or preferences than what a caricature of them will have, especially caricatures of the tier that you see in political cartoons, or on Twitter.
  - If you find yourself arguing with implausibly stereotyped caricatures, rather than real people, you should a) consider trying to flesh out enough details about the people you’re arguing with to be at all plausible and/or b) take a step back and rethink your life choices.
  - I know this is difficult for some people, but you should at least try.
- Try not to be ideologically captured, or at least notice when you are and don’t take yourself too seriously.
  - One of my greater failures as a internet commentator/dispassionate observer is during the whole SSC/NYT thing, where I failed to notice myself becoming increasingly tribal/using arguments as soldiers, etc.
    The level of outrage was made worse by just how petty the underlying disputes were.
    I do not think I thought or acted honorably according to my own values, and I’d prefer to minimize such tribalism going forwards
  - If you notice yourself in the grips of white-hot, rage, consider logging off and then do something take a shower, watch Netflix, go back to work, touch grass, crochet, or something else that’s not as corrosive to either your own soul or that of the community.
  - One dynamic I haven’t seen other people mention so far is the prevalence of what my friend calls “Rationality Justice Warriors,” people who (at least online) seem to champion a fairly uncompromising and aggressive stance on defending and evoking the norms and cultures of the rationality community whenever it appears to be under attack.
    This comes across as fairly childish and frankly irrational to me, and I suspect most people acting under such attitudes will not reflectively endorse them.
    Of course their opponents hardly do better.
- Model the effects of your sentences on other people.
  - I’m worried that many comments will predictably push away valuable contributors to the community, or be very costly in other ways (eg wasted time/emotions).
  - If you expect your sentences to predictably cause more heat than light, consider rephrasing what you said. Or perhaps, again, consider logging off.
  - This is not to say you can’t ever offer harsh criticism, or you need to always be nice. Being kind is not the same as being nice, and sometimes even true kindness have to be sacrificed for higher goals.
    But you should be careful about what trades you make, and maybe don’t sell out your kindness for too cheap a price (like the short-lived approval of your not-very-kind peers, or the brief euphoria of righteous rage)
  - It might be the case that what “needs to be said” can’t be said nicely, or rephrasing things in a diplomatic way takes more skill with the language than you have, or more time than you can afford. Under those circumstances, it is usually (not always) better to leave such criticisms than to leave them unsaid.
  - But you ought to be consciously making those tradeoffs, not falling into them blindly.
  - Effects include epistemic effects. If you say technically true things that makes people dumber, or worse, obviously wrong and/or illogical arguments in pursuit of a “higher” purpose, you are at least a little bit responsible for poisoning the discourse, and you should again ask yourself whether it’s worth it.
- Consider the virtue of silence^[2]
  - We are all busy people, and some of us have very high opportunity costs.
  - There are times to speak up, and times to stay silent, and let us all pray for the wisdom to know the difference.
1. ^
  I’m far from flawless on these grounds, myself. But I try my best. Or at least, I mostly try to try.
2. ^
  This is a virtue I’m personally exceedingly bad at practicing.

Linch

An­i­mal Welfare Fund: Pay­out recom­men­da­tions from May 2022 to March 2024

Animal Welfare Fund: Payout recommendations from May 2022 to March 2024