matthew.vandermerwe

• matthew.vandermerweJul 28, 2020, 10:51 AM

  5 points

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  in reply to: Pablo’s comment on: The Im­por­tance of Un­known Ex­is­ten­tial Risks

  Thanks — I agree with this, and should have made clearer that I didn’t see my comment as undermining the thrust of Michael’s argument, which I find quite convincing.

• matthew.vandermerweJul 24, 2020, 11:16 AM

  6 points

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  on: The Im­por­tance of Un­known Ex­is­ten­tial Risks

  Great post!

  But based on Rowe & Beard’s survey (as well as Michael Aird’s database of existential risk estimates), no other sources appear to have addressed the likelihood of unknown x-risks, which implies that most others do not give unknown risks serious consideration.

  I don’t think this is true. The Doomsday Argument literature (Carter, Leslie, Gott etc.) mostly considers the probability of extinction independently of any specific risks, so these authors’ estimates implicitly involve an assessment of unknown risks. Lots of this writing was before there were well-developed cases for specific risks. Indeed, the Doomsday literature seems to have inspired Leslie, and then Bostrom, to start seriously considering specific risks.

  Leslie explicitly considers unknown risks (p.146, End of the World):

  Finally, we may well run a severe risk from something-we-know-not-what: something of which we can say only that it would come as a nasty surprise like the Antarctic ozone hole and that, again like the ozone hole, it would be a consequence of technological advances.

  As does Bostrom (2002):

  We need a catch-all category. It would be foolish to be confident that we have already imagined and anticipated all significant risks. Future technological or scientific developments may very well reveal novel ways of destroying the world.

• matthew.vandermerweJul 23, 2020, 10:17 AM

  7 points

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  in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: How Much Does New Re­search In­form Us About Ex­is­ten­tial Cli­mate Risk?

  Very useful comment — thanks.

  Overall, I don’t view this as especially good news …

  How do these tail values compare with your previous best guess?

• matthew.vandermerweJul 17, 2020, 12:30 PM

  80 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: Ob­jec­tions to Value-Align­ment be­tween Effec­tive Altruists

  [ii] Some queries to MacAskill’s Q&A show reverence here, (“I’m a longtime fan of all of your work, and of you personally. I just got your book and can’t wait to read it.”, “You seem to have accomplished quite a lot for a young person (I think I read 28?). Were you always interested in doing the most good? At what age did you fully commit to that idea?”).

  I share your concerns about fandom culture /​ guru worship in EA, and am glad to see it raised as a troubling feature of the community. I don’t think these examples are convincing, though. They strike me as normal, nice things to say in the context of an AMA, and indicative of admiration and warmth, but not reverence.

• matthew.vandermerweJun 18, 2020, 5:39 AM

  16 points

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  in reply to: richard_ngo’s comment on: Should EA Buy Distri­bu­tion Rights for Foun­da­tional Books?

  Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, and twentieth century neoliberalism more broadly, owes a lot of its success to this sort of promotion. The book was published in 1944 and initially quite successful, but print runs were limited by wartime paper rationing. In 1945, the US magazine Reader’s Digest created a 20-page condensed version, and sold 1 million of these very cheaply (5¢ per copy). Anthony Fisher, who founded the IEA, came across Hayek’s ideas through this edition.

  Source: https://​​press.uchicago.edu/​​Misc/​​Chicago/​​320553.html

• matthew.vandermerweJun 17, 2020, 7:42 AM

  46 points

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  on: Should EA Buy Distri­bu­tion Rights for Foun­da­tional Books?

  Great post — this is something EA should definitely be thinking more about as the canon of EA books grows and matures. Peter Singer has done it already, buying back the rights for TLYCS and distributing a free digital versions for its 10th anniversary.

  I wonder whether most of the value of buying back rights could be captured by just buying books for people on request. A streamlined process for doing this could have pretty low overheads — it only takes a couple minutes to send someone a book via Amazon — and seems scalable. This should be easy enough for a donor or EA org to try.

  I also imagine that for most publishers, profits are concentrated after release

  I looked into this recently, using Goodreads data as a proxy for sales. My takeaway was that sales of these books have been surprisingly linear over time, rather than being concentrated early on: Superintelligence; Doing Good Better; TLYCS

• matthew.vandermerweJun 4, 2020, 7:28 AM

  13 points

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  on: X-risks to all life v. to humans

  Welcome to the forum!

  Further development of a mathematical model to realise how important timelines for re-evolution are.

  Re-evolution timelines have another interesting effect on overall risk — all else equal, the more confident one is that intelligence will re-evolve, the more confident one should be that we will be able to build AGI,* which should increase one’s estimate of existential risk from AI.

  So it seems that AI risk gets a twofold ‘boost’ from evidence for a speedy re-emergence of intelligent life:

  • Relative AI risk increases, since risk from most other sources is discounted a bit.

  • Absolute AI risk increases, since it pushes towards shorter AGI timelines.

  *Shulman & Bostrom 2012 discuss this type of argument, and some complexities in adjusting for observation selection effects

• matthew.vandermerweMay 18, 2020, 11:17 AM

  6 points

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  in reply to: Tobias_Baumann’s comment on: How Much Lev­er­age Should Altru­ists Use?

  [disclosure: not an economist or investment professional]

  emerging market bonds … aren’t (to my knowledge) distorted by the Fed buying huge amounts of bonds

  This seems wrong — the spillover effects of 2008–13 QE on EM capital markets are fairly well-established (cf the ‘Taper Tantrum’ of 2013).

  see e.g. Effects of US Quantitative Easing on Emerging Market Economies

  “We find that an expansionary US QE shock has significant effects on financial variables in EMEs. It leads to an exchange rate appreciation, a reduction in long-term bond yields, a stock market boom, and an increase in capital inflows to these countries.”

• matthew.vandermerweMay 2, 2020, 6:33 AM

  10 points

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  on: EA Up­dates for April 2020

  My top picks for April media relating to The Precipice:

  • SlateStarCodex’s review of The Precipice

  • Long-form interview with Toby Ord on EDGE — ‘We Have the Power to Destroy Ourselves Without the Wisdom to Ensure That We Don’t’

  • The Precipice reviewed in the The Observer — ‘What if COVID-19 isn’t our biggest threat?’

  • Toby Ord interviewed on The Ezra Klein Show

• matthew.vandermerweApr 25, 2020, 7:41 AM

  4 points

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  in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: How hot will it get?

  I wasn’t thinking about any implications like that really. My guess would be that the Kaya Identity isn’t the right tool for thinking about either (i) extreme growth scenarios; or (ii) the fossil fuel endgame; and definitely not (iii) AI takeoff scenarios.

  If I were more confident in the resource estimate, I would probably switch out the AI explosion scenario for a ‘we burn all the fossil fuels’ scenario. I’m not sure we can rule out the possibility that the actual limit is a few orders of magnitude more than 13.6PtC. IPCC cites Rogner 2014 for the figure. In personal communication, one scientist described Rogner’s previous (1997) estimate as:

  a mishmash of unreliable information, including self-reported questionnaires by individual governments

  It would be great to better understand these estimates — I’m surprised there isn’t more work on this. In particular, you’d think there would be geologically-based models of how much carbon there is, that aren’t so strongly grounded in known-reserves + current/​near-term technological capabilities.

• matthew.vandermerweApr 24, 2020, 2:39 PM

  6 points

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  in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: How hot will it get?

  Also note that your estimate for emissions in the AI explosion scenario exceeds the highest estimates for how much fossil fuel there is left to burn. The upper bound given in IPCC AR5 (WG3.C7.p.525) is ~13.6 PtC (or ~5*10^16 tons CO2).

  Awesome post!

• matthew.vandermerweMar 30, 2020, 11:27 AM

  2 points

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  in reply to: Eevee🔹’s comment on: Toby Ord’s ‘The Precipice’ is pub­lished!

  Yes I gave authorization!

The Precipice is out to­day in US & Canada! Au­dio­book now available

• matthew.vandermerweMar 12, 2020, 4:35 PM

  15 points

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  in reply to: MichaelA🔸’s comment on: Toby Ord’s ‘The Precipice’ is pub­lished!

  The audiobook will not include the endnotes. We really couldn’t see any good way of doing this, unfortunately.

  Toby is right that there’s a huge amount of great stuff in there, particularly for those already more familiar with existential risk, so I would highly recommend getting your hands on a physical or ebook version (IMO ebook is the best format for endnotes, since they’ll be hyperlinked).

• matthew.vandermerweMar 8, 2020, 3:28 PM

  2 points

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  in reply to: JP Addison🔸’s comment on: Toby Ord’s ‘The Precipice’ is pub­lished!

  I will investigate this and get back to you!

Toby Ord’s ‘The Precipice’ is pub­lished!

• matthew.vandermerweFeb 29, 2020, 2:50 PM

  9 points

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  on: COVID-19 brief for friends and family

  Thanks for writing this!

  In the early stages, it will be doubling every week approximately

  I’d be interested in pointers on how to interpret all the evidence on this:

  • until Jan 4: (Li et al) find 7.4 days

  • Jan 16–Jan 30: (Cheng & Shan) find ~1.8 days in China, before quarantine measures start kicking in.

  • Jan 20–Feb 6: (Muniz-Rodriguez et al) find 2.5 for Hubei [95%: 2.4–2.7], and other provinces ranging from 1.5 to 3.0 (with much wider error bars).

  • Eyeballing the most recent charts:

    • outside China looks like ~4–5 days

    • South Korea and Italy look shorter (~2-3 days?)

  • I’ve also seen it suggested that the outside-China growth might be inflated due to ‘catch up’ from slow roll-out of testing.

  Altogether, what is our best guess, and what evidence should we be looking out?

• matthew.vandermerweFeb 4, 2020, 10:19 AM

  7 points

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  on: Should Longter­mists Mostly Think About An­i­mals?

  In fact, x-risks that eliminate human life, but leave animal life unaffected would generally be almost negligible in value to prevent compared to preventing x-risks to animals and improving their welfare.

  Eliminating human life would lock in a very narrow set of futures for animals—something similar to the status quo (minus factory farming) until the Earth becomes uninhabitable. What reason is there to think the difference between these futures, and those we could expect if humanity continues to exist, would be negligible?

  As far as we know, humans are the only thing capable of moral reasoning, systematically pushing the world toward more valuable states, embarking on multi-generational plans, etc. etc. This gives very strong reasons for thinking the extinction of humanity would be of profound significance to the value of the future for non-humans.

• matthew.vandermerweJan 22, 2020, 4:21 PM

  9 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Henry Stanley 🔸’s comment on: UK donor-ad­vised funds

  Yeah—plus the opportunity cost of having it in cash. Looks like a non-starter.

• matthew.vandermerweJan 22, 2020, 4:18 PM

  3 points

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  in reply to: Henry Stanley 🔸’s comment on: UK donor-ad­vised funds

  Yeah, and how much you value the flexibility depends on what you expect to donate to.

  EA Funds already allows you to donate to small/​speculative projects, non-UK charities, etc, via a UK registered charity, so ‘only ever donating to UK charities’ is less restrictive than it sounds..