lukeprog

Karma: 1,283

lukeprog 20 Aug 2020 16:17 UTC
21 points
on: The EA Meta Fund is now the EA Infrastructure Fund
I like the new name; solid choice.

lukeprog 3 Aug 2020 12:10 UTC
5 points
on: Informational Lobbying: Theory and Effectiveness
Thanks for this!

FWIW, I’d love to see a follow-up review on lobbying Executive Branch agencies. They’re less powerful than Congress, but often more influenceable as well, and can sometimes be the most relevant target of lobbying if you’re aiming for a very specific goal (that is too “in the weeds” to be addressed directly in legislation). I found Godwin et al. (2012) helpful here, but I haven’t read much else. Interestingly, Godwin et al. find that some of the conclusions from Baumgartner et al. (2009) about Congressional lobbying don’t hold for agency lobbying.

lukeprog 31 May 2020 18:33 UTC
26 points
on: Forecasting Newsletter: May 2020.
Thanks!

Some additional recent stuff I found interesting:
- This summary of US and UK policies for communicating probability in intelligence reports.
- Apparently Niall Ferguson’s consulting firm makes & checks some quantified forecasts every year: “So at the beginning of each year we at Greenmantle make predictions about the year ahead, and at the end of the year we see — and tell our clients — how we did. Each December we also rate every predictive statement we have made in the previous 12 months, either “true”, “false” or “not proven”. In recent years, we have also forced ourselves to attach probabilities to our predictions — not easy when so much lies in the realm of uncertainty rather than calculable risk. We have, in short, tried to be superforecasters.”
- Review of some failed long-term space forecasts by Carl Shulman.
- Some early promising results from DARPA SCORE.
- Assessing Kurzweil predictions about 2019: the results
- Bias, Information, Noise: The BIN Model of Forecasting is a pretty interesting result if it holds up. Another explanation by Mauboussin here. Supposedly this is what Kahneman’s next book will be about; HBR preview here.
- GJP2 is now recruiting forecasters.

lukeprog 6 May 2020 19:34 UTC
9 points
in reply to: NunoSempere’s comment on: Forecasting Newsletter: April 2020
The headline looks broken in my browser. It looks like this:

/(Good Judgement?[^]*)|(Superforecast(ing|er))/gi

The last explicit probabilistic prediction I made was probably a series of forecasts on my most recent internal Open Phil grant writeup, since it’s part of our internal writeup template to prompt the grant investigator for explicit probabilistic forecasts about the grant. But it could’ve easily been elsewhere; I do somewhat-often make probabilistic forecasts just in conversation, or in GDoc/Slack comments, though for those I usually spend less time pinning down a totally precise formulation of the forecasting statement, since it’s more about quickly indicating to others roughly what my views are rather than about establishing my calibration across a large number of precisely stated forecasts.

lukeprog 1 May 2020 17:52 UTC
2 points
in reply to: NunoSempere’s comment on: Forecasting Newsletter: April 2020
Note that the headline (“Good Judgement Project: gjopen.com”) is still confusing, since it seems to be saying GJP = GJO. The thing that ties the items under that headline is that they are all projects of GJI. Also, “Of the questions which have been added recently” is misleading since it seems to be about the previous paragraph (the superforecasters-only questions), but in fact all the links go to GJO.

lukeprog 30 Apr 2020 22:46 UTC
14 points
on: Forecasting Newsletter: April 2020
Nice to see a newsletter on this topic!

Clarification: The GJO coronavirus questions are not funded by Open Phil. The thing funded by Open Phil is this dashboard (linked from our blog post) put together by Good Judgment Inc. (GJI), which runs both GJO (where anyone can sign up and make forecasts) and their Superforecaster Analytics service (where only superforecasters can make forecasts). The dashboard Open Phil funded uses the Superforecaster Analytics service, not GJO. Also, I don’t think Tetlock is involved in GJO (or GJI in general) much at all these days, but GJI is indeed the commercial spinoff from the Good Judgment Project (GJP) that Tetlock & Mellers led and which won the IARPA ACE forecasting competition and resulted in the research covered in Tetlock’s book Superforecasting.

lukeprog 21 Apr 2020 16:10 UTC
9 points
on: Insomnia with an EA lens: Bigger than malaria?
I wrote up some thoughts on CBT-I and the evidence base behind it here.

lukeprog 31 Dec 2019 22:44 UTC
2 points
in reply to: abergal’s comment on: Information security careers for GCR reduction
Is it easy to say more about (1) which personality/mindset traits might predict infosec fit, and (2) infosec experts’ objections to typical GCR concerns of EAs?

lukeprog 3 Dec 2019 2:44 UTC
51 points
on: Rethink Priorities 2019 Impact and Strategy
FWIW I was substantially positively surprised by the amount and quality of the work you put out in 2019, though I didn’t vet any of it in depth. (And prior to 2019 I think I wasn’t aware of Rethink.)

lukeprog 20 Nov 2019 22:41 UTC
27 points
in reply to: Buck’s comment on: I’m Buck Shlegeris, I do research and outreach at MIRI, AMA
FWIW, it’s not clear to me that AI alignment folks with different agendas have put less effort into (or have made less progress on) understanding the motivations for other agendas than is typical in other somewhat-analogous fields. Like, MIRI leadership and Paul have put >25 (and maybe >100, over the years?) hours into arguing about merits of their differing agendas (in person, on the web, in GDocs comments), and my impression is that central participants to those conversations (e.g. Paul, Eliezer, Nate) can pass the others’ ideological Turing tests reasonably well on a fair number of sub-questions and down 1-3 levels of “depth” (depending on the sub-question), and that might be more effort and better ITT performance than is typical for “research agenda motivation disagreements” in small niche fields that are comparable on some other dimensions.

lukeprog 7 Nov 2019 17:06 UTC
19 points
on: Opinion: Estimating Invertebrate Sentience
Interesting stuff, thanks!

lukeprog 4 Nov 2019 4:42 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Max_Daniel’s comment on: Notes on ‘Atomic Obsession’ (2009)
Thanks!

Notes on ‘Atomic Obsession’ (2009)

lukeprog26 Oct 2019 0:30 UTC

61 points

13 comments8 min readEA link

lukeprog 15 Oct 2019 22:48 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Taymon’s comment on: Information security careers for GCR reduction
Awesome, thanks for letting us know!

lukeprog 14 Oct 2019 0:59 UTC
6 points
in reply to: cole_haus’s comment on: [Link] “How feasible is long-range forecasting?” (Open Phil)
Thanks! I knew there was one major study I was missing from the 70s, and that I had emailed people about before, but I couldn’t track it down when I was writing this post, and I’m pretty sure this is the one I was thinking of. Of course, this study suffers from several of the problems I list in the post.

lukeprog 5 Sep 2019 3:53 UTC
7 points
on: What to know before talking with journalists about EA
The linked “full guide” seem to require sign-in?

lukeprog 4 Sep 2019 2:58 UTC
5 points
on: AI Forecasting Question Database (Forecasting infrastructure, part 3)
Nice work!

lukeprog 4 Sep 2019 2:48 UTC
30 points
on: Are we living at the most influential time in history?
Great post!

Even just a few decades ago, a longtermist altruist would not have thought of risk from AI or synthetic biology, and wouldn’t have known that they could have taken action on them.

Minor point, but I think this is unclear. On AI see e.g. here. On synbio I’m less familiar but I’m guessing someone more than a few decades ago was able to think thoughts like “Once we understand cell biology realy well, seems like we might be able to engineer pathogens much more destructive than those served up by nature.”

lukeprog 15 Jul 2019 20:53 UTC
8 points
in reply to: garymm’s comment on: Information security careers for GCR reduction
On the difference between the role we’ve tried to hire for at Open Phil specifically and a typical Security Analyst or Security Officer role, a few things come to mind, though we also think we don’t yet have a great sense of the range of security roles throughout the field. One possible difference is that many security roles focus on security systems for a single organization, whereas we’ve primarily looked for someone who could help both Open Phil and some of our grantees, each of whom have potentially quite different needs. Another possible difference is that our GCR focus in AI and biosecurity leads us to some non-standard threat models, and it has been difficult thus far for us to find experienced security experts who readily adapt standard security thinking to a somewhat different set of threat models.

Re: industry roles that would be particularly good or bad preparation. My guess is that for the GCR-mitigating roles we discuss above (i.e. not just potential future roles at Open Phil), the better-preparation for roles will tend to (a) expose one to many different types of challenges, and different aspects of those challenges, rather than being very narrowly scoped, (b) involve threat modeling of, and defense from, very capable and well-resourced attackers, and (c) require some development of novel solutions (not necessary new crypto research; could also just be new configurations of interacting hardware/software systems and user behavior policies and training), among other things.

lukeprog 15 Jul 2019 1:37 UTC
9 points
on: Invertebrate Welfare Cause Profile
On factors of potential relevance to moral weight, including some that could intuitively upweight many invertebrates, see also my Preliminary thoughts on moral weight.

lukeprog

Notes on ‘Atomic Ob­ses­sion’ (2009)

Notes on ‘Atomic Obsession’ (2009)