At some point, I kinda just want to say “ok, where has the forecasting money gone?”, and it seems to have overwhelmingly gone to community forecasting sites like Manifold and Metaculus. I don’t see anything like “paying 3 teams of 3 forecasters to compete against each other on some AI timelines questions”
MarcusAbramovitch
Karma: 1,374
I think your point 1 is a good starting point but I would add “in percentage terms compared to all other potential causes” and you have to be in the top 1% of that for EA to consider the cause neglected.
3. I didn’t make it. It is great though. I was talking about on a yearly basis in the last couple years. That said, I made the comment off memory so I could be wrong.
Yes, it’s a meta topic; I’m commenting less on the importance of forecasting in an ITN framework and more on its neglectedness. This stuff basically doesn’t get funding outside of EA, and even inside EA had no institutional commitment;
I don’t think it’s necessary to talk in terms of an ITN framework but something being neglected isn’t nearly reason enough to fund it. Neglectedness is perhaps the least important part of the framework and something being neglected alone isn’t a reason to fund it. Getting 6 year olds in race cars for example seems like a neglected cause but one that isn’t worth pursuing.
I think something not getting funding outside of EA is probably a medium-sized update to the thing not being important enough to work on. Things start to get EA funding once a sufficient number of the community finds the arguments for working on a problem sufficiently convincing. But many many many problems have come across EA’s eyes and very few of them have stuck. For something to not get funding from others suggests that very few others found it to be important.
Forecasting still seems to get a fair amount of dollars, probably about half as much as animal welfare. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ip7nXs7l-8sahT6ehvk2pBrlQ6Umy5IMPYStO3taaoc/edit?usp=sharing
Your points on helping future people (and non-human animals) are well taken.
I’m in the process of writing up my thoughts on forecasting in general and particularly EA’s reverence for forecasting but I feel, similar to @Grayden that forecasting is a game that is nearly perfectly designed to distract EAs from useful things. It’s a combination of winning, being right when others are wrong and seemingly useful, all wrapped into a fun game.
I’d like to see tangible benefits to more broad funding of forecasting that seems to be done in t he millions and tens of millions of dollars.
I would also be the type of person you would think would be a greater fan of forecasting. I’m the number one forecaster on Manifold and I’ve made tens of thousands of dollars on Polymarket. But I think we should start to think of forecasting as more of a game that EAs like to play, something like Magic the Gathering that is fun and has some relations to useful things but isn’t really useful by itself.
I haven’t disagree voted this. I’m the #1 trader on Manifold. I doubt prediction markets will be useful here. In fact, I think I could probably use prediction markets to “screw with people”. For example “watch out for X, Manifold thinks there is a 15% chance that they have a sexual assault charge in the next year”.
I agree that less money to the IRS will benefit the wealthy more but this is because the IRS already mainly audits wealthier people and thus less audits disproportionately reduces audits on the wealthy. This is similar to how tax cuts nearly always help the wealthy… because the wealthy pay the vast majority of taxes. It’s nearly impossible to cut taxes without the wealthy paying far less dollars in taxes than a middle class/poor person.
While more expensive to pursue cases against the wealthy, it is more than worth it when it comes to the increase in reward.
Some things to point out:
1. Often, things become crimes that get prosecuted when they are done by the wealthy vs. normal people. To be clear, the reason for this is that governments/prosecutors want money and there is a lot of money in going after Kjell Inge Røkke for an illegal boating license but there isn’t for a father letting his 15-year old child drive in a parking lot. There’s a lot of money going after a billionaire for tax evasion but not in someone having a side hustle where they make money under the table selling $50k worth of widgets per year. This is going to lead to billionaires’ actions being surveilled more and thus gone after for crimes more often than the average person. The reward makes it worth it. Billionaires will have far more legal/monetary resources and thus you should naively expect more settlements, particularly without an admission of wrongdoing.I suppose I recommend people think something like “ok, how bad was this really” when they look at billionaire crimes. Perhaps a litmus test of “would I remain friends with my average non-EA friend if I found out that they had done this”
2. The Giving Pledge has no restrictions on the charitable causes that signatories are allowed to support. As such, unfortunately, as you would likely expect, the vast majority of donations basically go to vanity projects to improve self-image that have little to do with trying to improve the world, let alone try to do so effectively. The median philanthropic gift in terms of impact is something like a generic climate organization with many philanthropic gifts going to building a building at a college to get their name on it or arts museums and such. A non-negligible amount is also tax evasion.
I feel quite able to give >$500k/year. I also think more money would make a lot more “just completely fund the thing” instead of people throwing $1000-2000 for “signal boosting” or hoping others come along to fund the thing.
I feel I could do similar and even larger amounts for the animal welfare space.
I’d encourage a lot of EA orgs and independent researchers to apply to these. One of the ways it will be necessary for EA to fund itself as it grows and potentially becomes more funding constrained is to get funding from outside the direct EA community.
100% agree that there are some very bad incentives at play to make it very likely that people who aren’t good fits join this type of arrangement and I agree that Nonlinear shouldn’t be “let off the hook” so to speak. I think there should have been some precautionary things in place from the get go. Lots more things
Everybody feels that they are a super savvy investor who will get above market returns and thus “others should donate now while I seek great financial returns to donate more later”
I’ve thought about this tradeoff a lot. I feel the same way. I have a realized APR over the last 4 years of around 300%. I’ve also donated ~20% over this time. I can imagine some think that it would have been better for me to continue to invest this money but:
1) I by no means expect this rate of return to continue as I am investing larger sums
2) What if stuff didn’t go in my favour
I haven’t figured out a better answer then “yes, you should always donate for several reasons, every year”. There are also non-financial factors at play here like value drift as well to consider as well as stable ecosystems/whatever the opposite of the unilateralist curse is.
I also want to push back (as a crypto investor myself who runs a crypto fund) on the idea that we know a bull run is coming. We don’t. Crypto is now a much much larger market than 2012/2013 when EA had a lot of edge investing in crypto and I really doubt we are going to have another macro free money period again.
Bitcoin is an $800B marketcap asset and crypto as a whole is 1.7T. You should expect far greater efficiency now and that retail investors/people with other jobs won’t do nearly as well as the pros.
Copying from the Facebook Group
Fellow crypto investor here (since 2015⁄16), I now run a crypto fund. A few points to make.
1. In the short term, way more money is made on getting in on trends before they are big than on fundamentals, at least they have historically. You wanted to get in on NFTs early. You wanted to get in on “AI tokens” early. You wanted to get in on yield farming early. You wanted to get in on ICOs early. You wanted to get in on dog tokens early. You wanted to get in on anything trending early. Etc. It didn’t matter what project fundamentals were. Trends cause things to go up. There is a large degree of pyramic scheme/ponzinomics involved. You make money by getting in before others. They pump your bags and you dump on them.
2. In the long term, fundamentals are all that matter. Vast majority of junk dies with the founders/insiders/smart traders scheming off a good amount with bags held by retail traders.
3. I want to push back on the idea that we know a bullrun is coming. We don’t. There are some bullish narratives around but also, bitcoin/eth are already up like 3x. What if the bullrun already happened and this is the “cycle’s top”? What if the Bitcoin ETFs don’t get approved? What if they do nothing? There is no law of nature that causes crypto cycles due to halvings, in fact, you should expect those to be way less prominent now that bitcoin is much larger and most of the coins that will ever exist are already out there. Pompliano’s supply squeeze or whatever based on miners is stupid. I think the last one was most likely coincidental due to ZIRP and I don’t suppose you have great macro forecasts to suggest we are going back to these territories that haven’t been priced into the market.
4. I want to caution people from thinking they have alpha. I think there are good reasons to think EAs can have alpha. Quasi-insider information from being so close to the tech scene, greater understanding of AI progress and effects, some first principles thinking, just being smarter, etc. But usually, retail traders don’t have alpha. They are the ones who think they do and pay the people that actually do. You have to be crystal clear as to where your edge comes from and not expand outside of that. Why do you expect this group to be better able to predict a large scale crypto cycle better than people who do this full time with teams of super well paid analysts and quant traders?
I’m not a big EMH proponent, but this group has had a lot of success and now I think has gotten too cocky and now thinks that even weak-EMH doesn’t apply to us.
Many people spend money besides rent+food+travel, so this sounds exaggerated.
It looks like they are bought phones, laptops, SIM cards, productivity tools, etc.
Probably many of the 19 are being remotely employed.
I know of only two people who worked at Nonlinear. They were both in person. Both had good experiences.
Reading Lukas_Gloor’s comment (and to a lesser extent, this still helpful one from Erica_Edelman) made me realize what I think is the big disagreement between people and why they are talking past each other.
It comes down to how you would feel about doing Alice/Chloe’s job.
Some people, like the Nonlinear folks and most of those sympathetic to them, think something like the following:
“Why is she such an ungrateful whiner? She has THE dream job/life. She gets to travel the world with us (which is awesome since we can do anything and this is what we chose to do), living in some insanely cool places with super cool and successful people AND she has a large degree of autonomy over what she does AND we are building her up and like 15% of her job is some menial tasks that we did right before she joined and come on it’s fine. How can you complain about the smallest unpleasant thing when the rest of your life rocks and this is your FIRST job out of college when this lifestyle is reserved for multimillionaires? She gets to live the life of a multimillionaire and is surrounded by cool EA people”
Others look at Alice/Chloe’s life and think something like the following:
“Wow, that really sucks to have to follow these people around all the time, doing whatever they want to do, living away from the comfort of your own home. She thought she was going to do operations work for a cool longtermist startup that was expanding but instead, she’s always on the clock, paid very little, and being told that getting to travel alongside them and live like them is a PERK! Run away from these people as fast as possible! How is anyone defending these rich, entitled, exploiters? Of course, she would exaggerate some things, it felt like that!”
Look at Lukas’ comment again and how they each describe a certain experience in St. Barth’s.
From Emerson/Nonlinear’s perspective, they didn’t bring someone on to do some stuff 9-5. They brought someone on to be one of them which includes doing stuff for a couple of hours whenever they pop up and this is just what it’s like to be in a faster pace startup (how Nonlinear describes themself and how Emerson has always lived and how he built his previous companies). It was in the job description. She’s going on this trip too after all and someone has to call the places to organize. Alright, she’s whining again so I’ll just take over, whatever.
From Chloe’s perspective, she’s been following these people around for the past month and always seeing them and wants a break from them and it’s finally her supposed day off so she wants it off but they randomly decide to do a day excursion. Well, that sucks. Now she is forced to spend the day with them AND do stupid planning tasks trying to convince some random guy to let her plan this last minute just because Emerson wants to. She then tells Kat that she doesn’t want to have to work on her weekends.
Look at Erica’s comment. If you think this is like being a remote travelling nanny who should be getting paid extra for the travel but you are getting paid less, it sucks. If you think this is joining some cool remote/travelling charity startup, this is awesome.
This also explains why some people (as Kat would say, 19⁄21 people) who joined Nonlinear under this arrangement had a great time. They got to live a cool life, with a lot of freedom, in cool places. To them, this was a great experience. They got to pocket $12k/year into savings and live like a king.
Essentially, what I think happened is there was a really bad fit (and there are some bad incentives that are also at play here that will take too long to go into with regards to selecting a candidate) and different expectations between the parties. Nonlinear wanted to start adding people to their crew and expanding their team who travelled the world and worked on AI safety and wanting people to slot right into how they do things; taking spontaneous vacations, living in exotic places where it’s always sunny, getting shit done regardless of who’s job it is etc. Alice/Chloe might have thought they wanted it but didn’t know and so they tried it out and they definitely didn’t like it but didn’t feel they could quit (Whether this was true or not. Remember that while they could probably leave whenever, they might not have felt like they could for reasons that are hard to explain).
What should have happened here? Hard to say. I think a gradual ramping up to this is super necessary and hiring people (from Nonlinear’s perspective: adding people to the team) after a couple of interviews that you had never really spent a lot of time with or lived with before is ill-advised. A 1/2-week work trial seems especially necessary here. But Alice/Chloe also needed to be doing some constant introspection from day 1 if they wanted to stay here.
Good point
How about you email them something like
“We are afraid of undue retaliation but also think it would be good for you guys to provide some counter-evidence for us to include. Therefore, we are going to delay publishing the post by 168 hours from the time of this email to give you time to collect evidence and send to us before we post. We don’t commit to updating the post based on your evidence but will consider it to make the post as truthful as possible. However, if we get the sense that you are spending this time threatening people and preparing retaliation instead of gathering evidence/screenshots, we will post immediately”
I also want to add that it’s not like Lightcone is some feeble powerless organization. Lightcone (and by extension, you + Ben) have a decent amount of power/status in EA. What exactly are you afraid of Emerson/Nonlinear doing?As i said, I think Emerson threatening the libel lawsuit was dumb.
Overall, I think Nonlinear looks pretty good here. I definitely think they made some mistakes, especially adding members to their work+travel arrangements, but on the whole, I think they acted pretty reasonably and were unjustly vilified.
A lot of people seem very concerned with the tone of the post, whether the “Sharing Information on Ben Pace” section was in bad taste/too retaliatory, whether there were too many pictures depicting the lifestyle, how exactly to compute their employees’ salaries, and so on. The primary thing that matters is the veracity and accuracy of the claims made in Ben’s original post, whether Nonlinear successfully refuted (enough of) the claims made, how good their evidence is and finally how open should the EA community be in continuing to work with Nonlinear in the future.
On the whole, I think Nonlinear fairly successfully refuted the vast majority of the concerning claims in Ben’s post, their evidence is pretty good and I’d be happy for the EA community to work with Nonlinear folks in the future.
Places I think people messed up and where improvement is needed
The Nonlinear Team
The Nonlinear team should have gotten their replies up sooner, even if in pieces. In the court of public opinion, time/speed matters. Muzzling up and taking ~3 months to release their side of the story comes across as too polished and buttoned up.
Not being selective enough about who they took into a very unorthodox work/living environment. I don’t think this type of work/living arrangement is always bad (though I do think that NL shouldn’t try it again, nor do I think a nomadic lifestyle is the most effective one generally). Still, I do think it needs to grow a lot more organically and have lower commitment tests that build up to this arrangement. Taking in a new employee to this environment is ill-advised. I’m happy to see that Nonlinear no longer lives with or travels with their employees.
I think Emerson’s threat of a libel lawsuit encourages a bad norm. He went to it far too fast and it escalated things too quickly.
Ben Pace
I think it is pretty reasonable to assume that ~1000-10000 hours and possibly more were spent by the community due to his original post (I am including all the reading and all the commenting in both posts) and a lot more time by all those doing the investigating and debunking. I also think it’s reasonable to assume that at least 10% of this time was likely to be spent and thus Ben should have put a lot more effort into fact-checking, waiting for evidence, etc.
I think Ben really messed up with not letting Nonlinear respond. I think it would have been reasonable for Ben to give Nonlinear, say, exactly one week to provide the evidence they wanted with a promise to read/review it and decide if he felt it was worthwhile to edit the post before publishing. A “search for negative information about the Nonlinear cofounders, not from a search to give a balanced picture of its overall costs and benefits.” definitely seems to be the wrong way to approach this.
The EA Forum comment section
There is far too much “I haven’t read the post or the evidence but the vibes/tone feel off so I am not going to bother reading what they wrote and I will continue to have my negative opinions” going on and not nearly enough grappling with the substance of what they wrote.
People should spend more time reading/reflecting than trying to comment right away.
People seem to really gravitate towards drama. These posts have some of the highest number of comments on any forum posts on the forum.
The EA community/the Community Health team
How could this not have been sent to the Community Health team for them to perform a private and thorough investigation with a conclusion at the end? It would have saved a lot of people a lot of time and reputational damage.
I agree with this though it is unfortunately much the same in lots of longtermism/AI safety. Also, if I am not mistaken, Emerson funds a lot of Nonlinear himself.
I agree this is an important consideration. Funnily enough, I think currently, on the margin at least, there is a lot of money in x-risk, in fact, more than we currently know what to do with. I don’t think many x-risk organizations are fundamentally constrained on dollars and several organizations could be a lot lot more frugal and have approximately equal results.