Max_Daniel

• Max_DanielAug 19, 2022, 9:30 PM

  2 points

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  in reply to: SaraAzubuike’s comment on: Crypto mar­kets, EA fund­ing and optics

  Woah...if 40% of wealth were wiped out, that would have no impact on investment? I think we have different assumptions about the elasticity between wealth and donations (my prior is that it’s fairly elastic).

  This Open Phil blog post is interesting in this context. (Though note in this case the underlying wealth change was, I believe, not driven by crypto and instead mostly by the bear market for tech stocks.)

The EAIF is dis­con­tin­u­ing most uni­ver­sity group funding

• Max_DanielAug 4, 2022, 12:44 AM

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: TW123’s comment on: Con­se­quen­tial­ists (in so­ciety) should self-mod­ify to have side con­straints

  Yep, this is one of several reasons why I think that Part I is perhaps the best and certainly the most underrated part of the book. :)

• Max_DanielJul 17, 2022, 2:06 PM

  2 points

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  in reply to: Sophia’s comment on: EA for dumb peo­ple?

  Good question! I’m pretty uncertain about the ideal growth rate and eventual size of “the EA community”, in my mind this among the more important unresolved strategic questions (though I suspect it’ll only become significantly action-relevant in a few years).

  In any case, by expressing my agreement with Linch, I didn’t mean to rule out the possibility that in the future it may be easier for a wider range of people to have a good time interacting with the EA community. And I agree that in the meantime “making people feel glad that they interacted with the community even if they do end up deciding that they can, at least for now, find more joy and fulfillment elsewhere” is (in some cases) the right goal.

• Max_DanielJul 13, 2022, 2:03 PM

  4 points

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  in reply to: rgb’s comment on: An­nounc­ing Non-triv­ial, an EA learn­ing plat­form for teenagers

  fwiw it also reminded me of the Radiohead logo.

• Max_DanielJul 13, 2022, 12:05 AM

  35 points

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  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: EA for dumb peo­ple?

  I think realizing that different people have different capacities for impact is importantly true. I also think it’s important and true to note that the EA community is less well set up to accommodate many people than other communities. I think what I said is also more kind to say, in the long run, compared to casual reassurances that makes it harder for people to understand what’s going on. I think most of the other comments do not come from an accurate model of what’s most kind to Olivia (and onlookers) in the long run.

  FWIW I strongly agree with this.

• Max_DanielJul 13, 2022, 12:02 AM

  10 points

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  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: EA for dumb peo­ple?

  I think social group stratification might explain some of the other comments to this post that I found surprising/​tone-deaf.

  Yes, that’s my guess as well.

• Max_DanielJul 12, 2022, 5:36 PM

  12 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Quadratic Reciprocity’s comment on: An­nounc­ing Non-triv­ial, an EA learn­ing plat­form for teenagers

  I feel like a lot of very talented teenagers actively avoid content that seems directly targeted at people their age (unless it seems very selective or something) because they don’t expect that to be as engaging /​ “on their level” as something targeted at university students.

  FWIW I think I would also have been pretty unlikely to engage with any material explicitly pitched at adolescents or young adults after about the age of 15, maybe significantly earlier.

• Max_DanielJul 12, 2022, 5:29 PM

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Darren_Tindall’s comment on: EA In­fras­truc­ture Fund: Septem­ber–De­cem­ber 2021 grant recommendations

  Thanks for your feedback and your questions!

  I’d be curious to know how open the fund is to this type of activity.

  We are very open to making grants funding career transitions, and I’d strongly encourage people who could use funding to facilitate a career transition to apply.

  For undergraduate or graduate stipends/​scholarships specifically, we tend to have a somewhat high bar because

  • (a) compared to some other kinds of career transitions they involve providing funding for a relatively long period of time and often fund activities that are useful mostly for instrumental reasons such as getting a credential (it’s a different matter if someone can do intrinsically valuable work on, say, AI safety or biosecurity as part of their degree); and

  • (b) there often are other sources of funding available for these that are allocated by criteria that partly correlate with ours – e.g. all else equal we care about someone’s potential for academic excellence, which also helps getting merit-based scholarships.

  That being said, we have made grants covering undergraduate or graduate studies in the past.

  Also, I was curious, I see some individuals are receiving upwards of $50k for a few months of overhead while others are receiving well below $50k for 12 months worth of overhead.

  Could you point to some specific examples? That might help me give a more specific answer.

  In general, a couple of relevant points are:

  • Some grants are funding part-time work, which naturally receives a lower total salary per month.

  • Grantees have widely varying levels of work experience, and differ in other ways that can be relevant for compensation (e.g. location-dependent cost of living).

  • That being said, inconsistent grant sizes are a known weakness of our process that we are working on fixing by developing some kind of ‘compensation policy.’

    • In the meantime, if you’re an EAIF grantee and think you are receiving insufficient compensation for your work, either on an absolute scale or compared to what comparable work earns elsewhere in EA contexts, I strongly encourage you to reach out to us and request an increase in funding. While we may not approve this in all cases, we will never hold such a request against anyone, and in the only case I can recall in which we did receive such a request we very quickly concluded that the original grant was too small and provided a follow-up grant.

• Max_DanielJul 12, 2022, 3:26 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Max_Daniel’s comment on: Will EAIF and LTFF pub­lish its re­ports of re­cent grants?

  These payout reports are now available here, albeit about two weeks later than I promised.

EA In­fras­truc­ture Fund: Septem­ber–De­cem­ber 2021 grant recommendations

• Max_DanielJul 12, 2022, 10:25 AM

  70 points

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  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: EA for dumb peo­ple?

  Most people on average are reasonably well-calibrated about how smart they are.

  (I think you probably agree with most of what I say below and didn’t intend to claim otherwise, reading your claim just made me notice and write out the following.)

  Hmm, I would guess that people on average (with some notable pretty extreme outliers in both directions, e.g. in imposter syndrome on one hand and the grandiose variety of narcissistic personality disorder on the other hand, not to mention more drastic things like psychosis) are pretty calibrated about how their cognitive abilities compare to their peers but tend to be really bad at assessing how they compare to the general population because most high-income countries are quite stratified by intelligence.

  (E.g., if you have or are pursuing a college degree, ask yourself what fraction of people that you know well do not and will never have a college degree. Of course, having a college degree is not the same as being intelligent, and in fact as pointed out in other comments if you’re reading this Forum you probably know, or have read content by, at least a couple of people who arguably are extremely intelligent but don’t have a degree. But the correlation is sufficiently strong that the answer to that question tells you something about stratification by intelligence.)

  That is, a lot of people simply don’t know that many people with wildly different levels of general mental ability. Interactions between them happen, but tend to be in narrow and regimented contexts such as one person handing another person cash and receiving a purchased item in return, and at most include things like small talk that are significantly less diagnostic of cognitive abilities than more cognitively demanding tasks such as writing an essay on a complex question or solving maths puzzles.

  For people with significantly above-average cognitive abilities, this means they will often lack a rich sense of how, say, the bottom third of the population in terms of general mental ability performs on cognitively demanding tasks, and consequently they will tend to significantly underestimate their general intelligence relative to the general population because they inadvertently substitute the question “how smart am I compared to the general population?” – which would need to involve system-2 reasoning and consideration of not immediately available information such as the average IQ of their peer group based on e.g. occupation or educational attainment – with the easier question “how smart am I compared to my peers?” on which I expect system 1 to do reasonably well (while, as always, of course being somewhat biased in one direction or the other).

  As an example, the OP says “I’m just average” but also mentions they have a college degree – which according to this website is true of 37.9% of Americans of age 25 or older. This is some, albeit relatively weak, evidence against the “average” claim depending on what the latter means (e.g. if it just means “between the first and third quartile of the general population” then evidence against this is extremely weak, while it’s somewhat stronger evidence against being very close to the population median).

  This effect gets even more dramatic when the question is not just about “shallow” indicators like one’s percentile relative to the general population but about predicting performance differences in a richer way, e.g. literally predicting the essays that two different people with different ability levels would write on the same question. This is especially concerning because in most situations these richer predictions are actually all that matters. (Compare with height: it is much more useful and relevant to know, e.g., how much different levels of height will affect your health or your dating prospects or your ability to work in certain occupations or do well at certain sports, than just your height percentile relative to some population.)

  I also think the point that people are really bad at comparing them to the general population because society is so stratified in various ways applies to many other traits, not just to specific cognitive abilities or general intelligence. Like, I think that question is in some ways closer to the question “at what percentile of trait X are you in the population of all people that have ever lived”, where it’s more obvious that one’s immediate intuitions are a poor guide to the answer.

  (Again, all of this is about gradual effects and averages. There will of course be lots of exceptions, some of them systematic, e.g. depending on their location of work teachers will see a much broader sample and/​or one selected by quite different filters than their peer group.

  I also don’t mean to make any normative judgment about the societal stratification at the root of this phenomenon. If anything I think that a clear-eyed appreciation of how little many people understand of the lived experience of most others they share a polity with would be important to spread if you think that kind of stratification is problematic in various ways.)

  What links here?

  • Mili­tary Ser­vice as an Op­tion to Build Ca­reer Capital by Molly (Aug 9, 2022, 8:22 PM; 180 points)

• Max_DanielJul 11, 2022, 11:52 PM

  18 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ex­plore the new UN de­mo­graphic pro­jec­tions to 2100

  Thanks, I think it’s great to make this data available and to discuss it.

  FWIW, while I haven’t looked at any updates the UN may have made for this iteration, when briefly comparing the previous UN projections with those by Vollset et al. (2020), available online here, I came away being more convinced by the latter. (I think I first heard about them from Leopold Aschenbrenner.) They tend to predict more rapidly falling fertility rates, with world population peaking well before the end of the century and then declining.

  The key difference in methods is that Vollset et al. model fertility as partly depending on educational attainment and access to contraceptives. By contrast, I believe the UN (at least in the previous iteration) primarily did a brute extrapolation of fertility trends.

  Assume we believe the causal claim that increased educational attainment and access to contraceptives causes lower fertility. Then modeling these two causes explicitly will beat a brute extrapolation of fertility if there are countries which:

  • Haven’t seen much of an increase in educational attainment or access to contraceptives, but will do so in the future; or

  • Have seen an increase in these two indicators which, however, (because of time lags or threshold effects) is not yet visible in falling fertility rates.

  And I think this happens to apply to quite a few countries.

  Some caveats:

  • I only had a pretty quick look at both the UN and the Vollset et al. projections. I wouldn’t be that surprised if my above summary of their respective methods is based on a misreading on my part or otherwise inaccurate in important ways.

  • There are obviously causal drivers of fertility that aren’t modeled by Vollset et al. either, such as policy effects – i.e., we might reasonably expect that countries will try to incentivize higher fertility (e.g. tax benefits for households with more children) once they start bearing significant costs from shrinking populations that are increasingly dominated by the elderly. (Similarly their model assumes that, e.g., there won’t be technological developments such as transformative AI or perhaps more mundanely things like artificial wombs that change which sorts of things fertility causally depends on.) So arguably both the UN and Vollset et al. should best be viewed as projections holding non-modeled variables constant as opposed to all-things-considered predictions.

  • An indirect and in my view fairly weak reason for skepticism about the Vollset et al. projections is that they are by a team of researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics of Evaluation (IHME), and that other work out of IHME was controversial in several instances, including their early COVID models. (I haven’t looked into how valid the criticisms of their other work are, nor whether there is any overlap in researchers between previous criticized work and their population projects – at least the first authors/​lead researchers seem to be different.)

• Max_DanielJul 11, 2022, 11:22 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Question Mark’s comment on: Ex­plore the new UN de­mo­graphic pro­jec­tions to 2100

  I think this is a relevant consideration, but murkier than it appears at first glance.

• Max_DanielJul 11, 2022, 11:03 PM

  21 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: A_donor’s comment on: EA for dumb peo­ple?

  Another relevant Slate Star Codex post is Against Individual IQ Worries.

• Max_DanielJul 7, 2022, 11:57 AM

  5 points

  7 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jack_S’s comment on: My Most Likely Rea­son to Die Young is AI X-Risk

  I didn’t vote on your comment on either scale, but FWIW my guess is that the disagreement is due to quite a few people having the view that AI x-risk does swamp everything else.

• Max_DanielJul 5, 2022, 2:07 AM

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: All moral de­ci­sions in life are on a heavy-tailed distribution

  I agree that something like this is true and important.

  Some related content (more here):

  • Owen Cotton-Barratt’s talk Prospecting for gold

  • Kokotajlo & Oprea (2020), Counterproductive Altruism: The Other Heavy Tail

  • Thomas Kwa’s post Effectiveness is a Conjunction of Multipliers

  • The appendix of Ben Todd & my doc on performance differences between people

• Max_Daniel 5 Jul 2022 1:55 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Two tongue-in-cheek EA anthems

  [Info hazard notice: not safe for work.]

  Being somewhat self-conscious about being among the older members of the EA community despite being only in my early 30s, I rather turn toward Tocotronic’s Ich möchte Teil einer Jugendbewegung sein (“I want to be part of a youth movement”).

  In a rare feat of prescience, the band also editorialized EA culture in many of their releases starting with their 1991 debut:

  • Digital ist besser (“Digital is better”, an influential argument for transhumanism)

  • Drei Schritte vom Abgrund entfernt (“Three steps away from The Precipice”, Google review of a London shopping centre by a young EA after they met Toby Ord on an escalator)

  • Wir sind hier nicht in Seattle, Dirk (“We are not in Seattle here, Dirk”, a common realization among rationalists after they’ve relocated to the Bay Area)

  • Die Idee ist gut, doch die Welt noch nicht bereit (“The idea is good but the world isn’t ready yet”; devastating objection to EA by the incumbent intellectual elite)

  • Über Sex kann man nur auf Englisch singen (“About sex one can only sing in English”, on the innovative idea to utilize the tried and true strategy of speaking in tongues when conveying info hazards)

  • Ich werde mich nie verändern (“I will never change”, meditative mantra used to stave off the threat of value drift)

  • Ich bin viel zu lange mit euch mitgegangen (“I’ve walked with you for way too long”, anonymous EA upon resolving to embark on the mythical quest of ‘building inside-view models’)

  • Morgen wird wie heute sein (“Tomorrow will be like today”, an early pretheoretic articulation of the principle of forecasting by trend extrapolation)

  • Dringlichkeit besteht immer (“Urgency always obtains”, on the haste consideration)

  • Pure Vernunft darf niemals siegen (the true meaning – an oblique diss of Immanuel Kant – only becomes apparent when considering the song title’s English translation, “Pure Reason must never prevail”).

  • Macht es nicht selbst (“Don’t do it yourself”, the battle cry of EAs who’ve just realized they can use virtual assistants)

  (I usually choose to remain silent about the band’s most significant early misstep – their flirtation with early Leverage Research in Jungs, hier kommt der Masterplan [“Boys, here comes the masterplan”].)

• Max_Daniel 27 Jun 2022 15:55 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ex­am­ples of some­one ad­mit­ting an er­ror or chang­ing a key conclusion

  This doesn’t have all of the properties you’re most looking for, but one example is this video by YouTuber Justin Helps which is about correcting an error in an earlier video and explaining why he might have made that error. (I don’t quite remember what the original error was about – I think something to do with Hamilton’s rule in population genetics.)

• Max_Daniel 2 Jun 2022 12:01 UTC

  6 points

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  in reply to: EdoArad’s comment on: Con­test: 250€ for trans­la­tion of “longter­mism” to German

  FWIW to me as a German native speaker this proposed translation sounds like “long nap”, “long slumber” or similar. :)