Linch

Karma: 12,701

“To see the world as it is, rather than as I wish it to be.”

I’m a Research Manager on the General Longtermism team at Rethink Priorities. I’m primarily interested in coming up with, prioritizing, and potentially incubating the “longtermist megaprojects of the future,” and secondarily interested in strategic clarity for intermediate goals EAs should aim for on a 5-15 year timescale.

I also do some grantmaking on the side.

People may or may not also be interested in my comments on Metaculus and Twitter, though (un)fortunately I’m now less active on them:

Metaculus: https://pandemic.metaculus.com/accounts/profile/112057/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LinchZhang

Clarification on commenting norms

Linch 3 Jul 2022 3:14 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Peter’s comment on: (Even) More Early-Career EAs Should Try AI Safety Technical Research
(Maybe obvious point, but) there just aren’t that many people doing longtermist EA work, so basically every problem will look understaffed, relative to the scale of the problem.

Linch 2 Jul 2022 8:17 UTC
4 points
on: To fund research, or not to fund research, that is the question
I think the model setup or at least the clarifications around it needs tweaking. Namely you’re assuming that the main reason we may discontinue a researched-to-be-positive intervention is due to intrinsic time preference. But I think it’s much more likely that over enough time there will be distributional shift/generalizability issues with old studies.
For one example, if we’re all dead, a lot of studies are kind of useless. For another example, studies on the cost-effectiveness of (e.g.) malaria nets and deworming pills becomes increasingly out-of-distribution as (thankfully!) malarial and intestinal worm loads decrease worldwide, perhaps in the future approaching zero.

Linch 1 Jul 2022 20:49 UTC
8 points
on: (Even) More Early-Career EAs Should Try AI Safety Technical Research
if you have good evidence that your shape rotator abilities aren’t reasonably strong — e.g., you studied reasonably hard for SAT Math but got <700 (90th percentile among all SAT takers).^[6]
This is really minor, but I think there’s a weird conflation of spatial-visual reasoning and mathematical skills in this post (and related memespaces like roon’s). This very much does not fit my own anecdotal experiences*, and I don’t think this is broadly justified in psychometrics research.
*FWIW, I’ve bounced off of AISTR a few times. I usually attribute the difficulty being that I broadly have high but insufficiently high mathematical ability. Though I’m open to spatial-visual reasoning being the bottleneck (I’m actually very bad at this, like I regularly get lost in places I’ve lived in for years).

Linch 30 Jun 2022 7:15 UTC
4 points
in reply to: aogara’s comment on: Some unfun lessons I learned as a junior grantmaker
I’d still be interested in hearing how the existing level of COIs affects your judgement of EA epistemics.
I’m confused by this. My inside view guess is that this is just pretty small relative to other factors that can distort epistemics. And for this particular problem, I don’t have a strong coherent outside view because it’s hard to construct a reasonable reference class for what communities like us with similar levels of CoIs might look like.

Linch 28 Jun 2022 0:28 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Arepo’s comment on: Impact markets may incentivize predictably net-negative projects
Ironically, the person I mentioned in my previous comment is one of the main players at Anthropic, so your second paragraph doesn’t give me much comfort.
I don’t understand your sentence/reasoning here. Naively this should strengthen ofer’s claim, not weaken it.

Linch 24 Jun 2022 22:36 UTC
8 points
in reply to: aogara’s comment on: Some unfun lessons I learned as a junior grantmaker
Here’s my general stance on integrity, which I think is a superset of issues with CoI.
As noted by ofer, I also think investments are structurally different from grants.

Linch 24 Jun 2022 20:14 UTC
12 points
in reply to: Dr. David Mathers’s comment on: On Deference and Yudkowsky’s AI Risk Estimates
Speaking for myself, I was interested in a lot of the same things in the LW cluster (Bayes, approaches to uncertainty, human biases, utilitarianism, philosophy, avoiding the news) before I came across LessWrong or EA. The feeling is much more like “I found people who can describe these ideas well” than “oh these are interesting and novel ideas to me.” (I had the same realization when I learned about utilitarianism...much more of a feeling that “this is the articulation of clearly correct ideas, believing otherwise seems dumb”).

That said, some of the ideas on LW that seemed more original to me (AI risk, logical decision theory stuff, heroic responsibility in an inadequate world), do seem both substantively true and extremely important, and it took me a lot of time to be convinced of this.
(There are also other ideas that I’m less sure about, like cryonics and MW).

Linch 23 Jun 2022 21:55 UTC
5 points
on: Why EAs should normalize using Glassdoor
I think an ideal social norm would be only reviewing an organization after you are no longer working with them and thus can review the full experience.
This implies that a nontrivial fraction of employees would leave, which seems true of some EA orgs and not others (and I think the difference is non-random for pretty obvious reasons).

Linch 23 Jun 2022 21:53 UTC
22 points
on: EA Dedicates
See also Altruism as a central purpose.

Linch 23 Jun 2022 21:50 UTC
4 points
in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: On Deference and Yudkowsky’s AI Risk Estimates
I’m a bit confused by both this post and comments about questions like what level/timing the deference happens.

Speaking for myself, if an internet rando wrote a random blog post called “AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities,” I probably would not read it. But I did read Yudkowsky’s post carefully and thought about it nontrivially, mostly due to his track record and writing ability (rather than e.g. because the title was engaging or because the first paragraph was really well-argued).

Linch 22 Jun 2022 22:13 UTC
10 points
in reply to: ofer’s comment on: Impact markets may incentivize predictably net-negative projects
Fair, though many EAs are probably in positions where they can talk to other billionaires (especially with >5 hours of planning), and probably chose not to do so.

Linch 22 Jun 2022 18:08 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Arepo’s comment on: Impact markets may incentivize predictably net-negative projects
In 2015, when I was pretty new to EA, I talked to a billionaire founder of a company I worked at and tried to pitch them on it. They seemed sympathetic but empirically it’s been 7 years and they haven’t really done any EA donations or engaged much with the movement. I wouldn’t be surprised if my actions made it at least a bit harder for them to be convinced of EA stuff in the future.

In 2022, I probably wouldn’t do the same thing again, and if I did, I’d almost certainly try to coordinate a bunch more with the relevant professionals first. Certainly the current generation of younger highly engaged EAs seemed more deferential (for better or worse) and similar actions wouldn’t be in the Overton window.

Linch 22 Jun 2022 7:30 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Emrik’s comment on: Impact markets may incentivize predictably net-negative projects
My understanding is that without altruistic end-buyers, then the intrinsic value of impact certificates becomes zero and it’s entirely a confidence game.

Linch 21 Jun 2022 16:15 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: On Deference and Yudkowsky’s AI Risk Estimates
Thank you, this clarification makes sense to me!

Linch 20 Jun 2022 21:54 UTC
28 points
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: On Deference and Yudkowsky’s AI Risk Estimates
This critique strikes me as about as sensible as digging up someone’s old high-school essays and critiquing their stance on communism or the criminal justice system. I want to remind any reader that this is an opinion from 1999, when Eliezer was barely 20 years old. I am confident I can find crazier and worse opinions for every single leadership figure in Effective Altruism, if I am willing to go back to what they thought while they were in high-school. To give some character, here are some things I believed in my early high-school years
This is really minor and nitpicky, and I agree with much of your overall points, but I don’t think equivocating between “barely 20” and “early high-school” is fair. The former is a normal age to be a third-year university student in the US, and plenty of college-age EAs are taken quite seriously by the rest of us.

Linch 19 Jun 2022 5:38 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Owen Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic
Sure that makes more sense to me. I was previously reading “few” as 2-4 times, and was thinking that’s way too few times to be asking for help from coworkers total in a week, but a bit too high to be asking (many) specific senior people for help each year.

Linch 19 Jun 2022 3:22 UTC
11 points
in reply to: Owen Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic
My guess is that people should ask their friends/colleagues/acquaintances for help with things a few times a week, and ask senior people they don’t know for help with things a few times a year. T
Is this a few times each person, or a few times total? It’s hard for me to tell because either seems slightly off to me.

Linch 19 Jun 2022 2:41 UTC
3 points
in reply to: brb243’s comment on: A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform
Have you considered that deworming may be a perpetual need while influencing a decision that motivates a sustainable systemic change a permanent solution? This could justify spending on advocacy, in general.
It’s an interesting hypothesis, but I don’t think deworming is a perpetual need? I don’t think I took deworming pills growing up, and I doubt most Forum readers did.
Framed another way, I don’t think we should have a strong prior belief that if we subsidize health interventions for X years, this means they’ll need to be continuously subsidized by the globally rich, while “systematic” policy changes in the West are successful as one-offs.

Linch 18 Jun 2022 20:27 UTC
18 points
in reply to: AppliedDivinityStudies’s comment on: A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform
Basically, there’s a big difference between “OP made a mistake because they over/underrated X” and “OP made a mistake because they were politically or PR motivated and intentionally made sub-optimal grants.”
The synthesis position might be something like “some subset of OP made a mistake because they were subconsciously politically or PR motivated and unintentionally made sub-optimal grants.”
I think this is a reasonable candidate hypothesis, and should not be that much of a surprise, all things considered. We’re all human.

Linch 17 Jun 2022 19:57 UTC
13 points
in reply to: Agrippa’s comment on: A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform
Yeah I mean, no kidding. But it’s called Open Philanthropy. It’s easy to imagine there exists a niche for a meta-charity with high transaparency and visibility. It also seems clear that Open Philanthropy advertises as a fulfillment of this niche as much as possible and that donors do want this.
I don’t understand this point. Can you spell it out?

From my perspective, Open Phil’s main legible contribution is a) identifying great donation opportunities, b) recommending Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz to donate to such opportunities, and c) building up an apparatus to do so at scale.
Their donors are specific people, not hypothetical “donors who want transparency.” I assume Open Phil is quite candid/transparent with their actual donors, though of course I don’t have visibility here.