Max Görlitz

• Max GörlitzMay 4, 2023, 8:10 AM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Air Safety to Com­bat Global Catas­trophic Biorisks [REVISED]

  Thanks for your transparency and for updating this report; I think it is tremendously valuable. I have only skimmed so far, but I will hopefully read through it completely soon.
  
  I also tried to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the cost-effectiveness of 254 nm upper-room GUV per eACH a while ago. I estimated higher numbers in my model, more on the order of $100/​eACH/​year (For context: the report estimates ~$14/​eACH/​year). Note that the model is pretty rough, but I’ll post it anyway in case it proves useful for others.

  I think this difference comes mainly from having a much lower point estimate of eACH that is realistically achievable. In general, I am rather skeptical of eACH estimates for GUV that go into the hundreds.

  As far as I understand, the way eACH are calculated depends on the specific pathogen in question. Pathogens vary widely in their susceptibility to GUV, and coronaviruses are unusually susceptible IIRC. Since many of these eACH estimates were calculated based on measurements with coronaviruses, this inflates the values, and they’d presumably be significantly lower for other pathogens.

  Another point is that AFAICT, the higher eACH estimates mostly (all?) come from computational models and not real-world measurements. I assume that real-world environments are messy and will be less ideal for achieving very high eACH rates.

  I think I had another reason for my skepticism, but unfortunately, I can’t recall it right now—will update this comment should I remember.

• Max GörlitzMay 2, 2023, 3:02 PM

  9 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: First clean wa­ter, now clean air

  Great post! I also believe in the need to get our air clean ASAP.

  Self-promotion: check out SecureBio’s work on far-UVC. We will hopefully publish more write-ups soon.

  Minor point: In an informal survey of experts in the field, most people preferred the term germicidal UV (GUV) over Ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI). I also think that UVGI is a bit unwieldy, and “irradiation” sounds scary (although in Rethink Priorities’ survey on this, the name didn’t seem to matter much for people’s impressions of the technology).

  Interesting observation: With indoor air cleaners, there doesn’t seem to be any real-world epidemiological evidence of whether they reduce infection rates (of course, on priors, I would expect them to). At least I didn’t find any studies when I looked into it a few months ago, which surprised me. Such data also doesn’t yet exist for far-UVC, but there is a bunch on conventional upper-room GUV (most of it decades old, though).

  Good news on the regulation side: ASHRAE Commits to Developing an IAQ Pathogen Mitigation Standard. I’ll be curious to see what comes out of it.

  Also, I have a standing invitation for people to contact me if they are interested in working on GUV or far-UVC specifically and want to know what they could do!

• Max GörlitzMar 30, 2023, 11:59 AM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ten­ta­tive prac­ti­cal tips for us­ing chat­bots in research

  I have also had some success with https://​​www.perplexity.ai/​​, but I have only queried it a handful of times so far.

• Max GörlitzFeb 20, 2023, 9:38 AM

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Shal­low Re­port on Coronary Heart Disease

  Thanks for the analysis! I only skimmed it so far, but I was wondering whether you have any thoughts on the possible intervention of advancing statins and PCSK9-inhibitors, making them much cheaper and more widely distributed? I have encountered a few maximalists dreaming of “putting them in the tap water”.

  There is also a lot of hype around PCSK9 gene therapy.

• Max GörlitzFeb 15, 2023, 2:10 PM

  12 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: milkyway’s comment on: FYI there is a Ger­man in­sti­tute study­ing so­ciolog­i­cal as­pects of ex­is­ten­tial risk

  That’s fair. It was unreasonable of me to imply that their work is epistemically sound without engaging with it more. I flagged that I had only stumbled upon it and hadn’t engaged with it, but that should have restrained me from implying their criticism being epistemically sound.

  In general, my idea of this post was more, “How curious, this sociology-ish institute is studying something related to x-risk and has engaged with EA in some way. Let me just share this and see what other people think.” and not “The criticism of this group is correct and very important, EA needs to engage with it to improve.”

• Max GörlitzFeb 13, 2023, 4:31 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: HaydnBelfield’s comment on: FYI there is a Ger­man in­sti­tute study­ing so­ciolog­i­cal as­pects of ex­is­ten­tial risk

  Awesome, thanks for giving useful context!

FYI there is a Ger­man in­sti­tute study­ing so­ciolog­i­cal as­pects of ex­is­ten­tial risk

• Max GörlitzJan 26, 2023, 10:17 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: New ver­sion of Men­tal Health Nav­i­ga­tor website

  The website is currently down for me. Might just be a temporary issue but fyi

• Max GörlitzJan 24, 2023, 12:00 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: An­nounc­ing In­tro­duc­tions for Col­lab­o­ra­tive Truth Seek­ing Tools

  I am looking forward to this! I have used a bunch of these tools before but have long suspected that they could be used much more effectively.

• Max GörlitzJan 22, 2023, 11:04 AM

  11 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: An­nounc­ing Cavendish Labs

  I work on far-UVC safety. Dm me if you want to get in touch :)

• Max GörlitzJan 18, 2023, 8:39 PM

  25 points

  13 ∶ 0

  in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Pos­si­ble changes to EA, a big up­voted list

  Seems highly dependent of the subject, how established the field is

• Max GörlitzJan 6, 2023, 10:29 AM

  11 points

  3 ∶ 0

  on: Me­tac­u­lus Year in Re­view: 2022

  Thanks for this update. I like Metaculus and have started forecasting more in 2022.

  Something I would enjoy seeing is the ability to have a very quick UI for creating private questions, similar to what Nathan proposes here: https://​​www.super-linear.org/​​prize?recordId=recYHpvvGFmiFq9tS
  
  Here is what I imagine this could look like:

  1. I pull up https://​​quick.metaculus.com

  2. I only see an empty command line, and when I type in, e.g. “Will Putin still be President of Russia at the end of 2023? 1y”, it instantly creates a private binary question that closes at the end of today and puts the resolve date to one year from today. The question title is filled out as a random combination of the words from the question text. It just fills in a dot for background info, resolution criteria, and fine print.

  3. The format could be “[question text]? [resolve date]” where the question mark serves as the indicator for the end of the question text, and the resolve date part can interpret things like “1w”, “1y”, “eoy”, “5d”

  4. In a perfect world, this would also integrate with Alfred on my mac so that it becomes extremely easy and quick to create a new private question

  This feature would allow me to quickly create a binary private forecast when I am thinking of it and improve my calibration over time.
  
  Also, I have a question about the calibration plot that Metaculus creates on my profile: Does it only take into account the last forecast I made on a question or somehow integrates all forecasts I made on one question over time and puts that into the calibration plot?

  What links here?

  • Max Görlitz's comment on Fate­book: the fastest way to make and track predictions by Adam Binksmith (Jul 11, 2023, 4:01 PM; 3 points)

• Max GörlitzJan 1, 2023, 1:53 PM

  19 points

  3 ∶ 3

  on: Your 2022 EA Fo­rum Wrapped 🎁

  This is so awesome, much cooler than Spotify Wrapped!!

• Max GörlitzNov 8, 2022, 9:07 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: MaxG’s Shortform

  Cross-posting this from my blog because the philosophical issues around egoism and altruism will be of interest to some people here.

  Until I was ~16, I used to believe that there was no altruism and that everything anybody does is always for purely egoistical reasons. As far as I can remember, I grew confident of this after hearing an important childhood mentor talk about it. I had also read about the ideas of Max Stirner and had a vague understanding of his notion of egoism.

  I can’t remember what made me change my mind exactly, but pondering thought experiments similar to this one from Nate Soares played a significant role:

  Imagine you live alone in the woods, having forsaken civilization when the Unethical Psychologist Authoritarians came to power a few years back.

  Your only companion is your dog, twelve years old, who you raised from a puppy. (If you have a pet or have ever had a pet, use them instead.)

  You’re aware of the fact that humans have figured out how to do some pretty impressive perception modification (which is part of what allowed the Unethical Psychologist Authoritarians to come to power).

  One day, a psychologist comes to you and offers you a deal. They’d like to take your dog out back and shoot it. If you let them do so, they’ll clean things up, erase your memories of this conversation, and then alter your perceptions such that you perceive exactly what you would have if they hadn’t shot your dog. (Don’t worry; they’ll also have people track you and alter the perceptions of anyone else who would see the dog, so that they also see the dog, so that you won’t seem crazy. And they’ll remove that fact from your mind, so you don’t worry about being tracked.)

  In return, they’ll give you a dollar.

  I noticed that taking the dollar and getting the dog killed would be the self-interested and egoistically rational choice, but I cared about the dog and didn’t want him to die!

  Furthermore, psychological egoism bugs me because its proponents often need to come up with overly complicated explanations for seemingly altruistic behaviours. My belief in the importance of Occam’s razor led me to conclude that often the simplest explanation of certain behaviours is that they are “just altruistic.”

  For example, say a soldier throws himself on a grenade to prevent his friends from being killed. Psychological egoists need to come up with some convoluted reason for why he did this out of pure self-interest:

  

  Even though I have come to believe that “real” altruistic behaviour exists, I still believe that pure altruism is rare and that I take the vast majority of my actions for egoistical reasons. The reasoning behind this often boils down to somewhat cynical explanations à la The Elephant in the Brain. For example, I engage a lot with effective altruism, but my motivation to do so can also largely be explained by egoistic reasons.

  While pondering this whole issue of egoism, I wondered whether I could come up with a self-measure of how egoistic I am. Two potential proxies came to mind:

  Proxy 1: Two buttons

  Consider the following thought experiment:

  You are given the option of pressing one of two buttons. Press button A and you die instantly. Press button B and a random person in the world dies instantly. You have to press one of them. Which one do you choose?

  Let’s take it up a notch:

  Imagine that when you press button B, instead of one random person dying, two random people die. We can increase this to any positive number n. At what number n of people—that would die at the press of button B—would you press button A instead of button B?

  Now consider a different version:

  You are given a gun and the choice to take one of two actions. You can either shoot yourself in the head or shoot a random person from somewhere in the world in the head that is suddenly teleported to stand in front of you. You have to take one of those two actions. Which one do you choose?

  Let’s take it up a notch again:

  You are given a gun and the choice to take one of two actions. You can either shoot yourself in the head or shoot n random people from somewhere in the world in the head that are suddenly teleported to stand in front of you. At what number n of people, that you would need to shoot in the head, would you prefer to shoot yourself?

  In a consequentialist framework, both decisions result in the same outcome. Notice that they feel very different, though. At least they do so for me.

  Proxy 2: Hedonium

  Imagine being offered the opportunity of spending the rest of your life in hedonium. What I mean by hedonium is being in a state of perfect bliss for every second of the rest of your life. Variations of this thought experiment and related concepts are the experience machine, orgasmium, and wireheading. Let’s say we take the valence of the best moment of your life, increase its pleasure by a few orders of magnitude, and enable you to stay in that state of boundless joy until you cease existing in ~100 years.

  The only downside is that while all this pleasure is filling your mind, your body is floating around in a tank of nutrient fluid or something. You can’t take any more actions in the world. You can’t impact it in any way. Opting into hedonium could therefore be considered egoistic because while you are experiencing pleasure beyond words, you wouldn’t be able to help other people live better lives.

  How likely would you be to accept the offer? Consider how tempting it feels, whether your gut reaction is to accept or decline it outright or whether it seems more complicated.

  I hypothesise that giving a larger number of n in the first proxy and a higher probability of opting into hedonium roughly correlates with being more egoistic. I explicitly choose not to give my reactions to these thought experiments to not bias anyone, but I invite readers to leave their responses in the comments.

• Max Görlitz 8 Nov 2022 9:00 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Tyner’s comment on: MaxG’s Shortform

  I was referring to the one Sarah pointed out :)

  Thanks for replying!

• Max Görlitz 8 Nov 2022 8:59 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Sarah Cheng’s comment on: MaxG’s Shortform

  Yes, that is the one! Thanks, Sarah. I wasn’t able to find it.

• Max Görlitz 7 Nov 2022 21:34 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: MaxG’s Shortform

  I remember there was this forum post with a list of selfish/​egoistic reasons to be into effective altruism. I can’t find it right now, can anyone point me to it?

  It contains things like:

  1. EA gives me meaning in my life

  2. EA provides me with an ingroup where I can have a high social status

  3. I get to be friends with smart people

  4. I can feel superior to most other people because I know that I am doing something to improve the world

  etc.

• Max Görlitz 6 Jul 2022 6:30 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Max_Daniel’s comment on: All moral de­ci­sions in life are on a heavy-tailed distribution

  Thanks, I was only aware of two of these!

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

• Max Görlitz 21 May 2022 9:35 UTC

  30 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Death to 1 on 1s

  I strongly disagree with the sentiment that 1-1s are dehumanizing, as I have found that most of my 1-1s have been friendly, warm, and fun even though they were mostly confined to 30 min.

  Something else I can recommend is taking a walk around the block with someone instead of sitting at a table facing each other. This makes it more casual and less formal.

  Overall I understand your idea that 1-1s can seem too business-like but my impression is that there are a few tricks to approach them in a way that is more fun.

  Regarding your example of meeting the best people in the strangest places, I also make sure to add randomness to my conferences: https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​ixdejJKnonBmaiF4T/​​add-randomness-to-your-ea-conferences