mikbp

Karma: 151

mikbp 23 Sep 2021 9:13 UTC
1 point
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on: The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant
I think the weak point of the fable is that they only begin to think about the reorganisation after the dragon is dead; this could lead to worse consequences than the dragon. Thinking about overpopulation, for example, at least they have to know that they have enough environmental buffer to sustain it until the culture drift back into having fewer children later. Otherwise, the whole population could just die of hunger.
Actually, I don’t think this is a weak point of the fable, it actually makes it much more real; that’s how we humans usually behave. What it shows is that we really need to avoid this mistake.

mikbp 22 Nov 2021 13:07 UTC
3 points
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on: Writing about my job: Research Fellow, FHI
I do research in topics that I’m very interested in, as you. And I am also very interested in EA, rationality and so on, as you seem to be. I was wandering if you share a problem I have: I really don’t know where my work starts or ends. I mean, many stuff I do (read, watch, write) for fun could be clearly considered work, and vice versa, many things I do for work could be considered leisure. It does also seem to be the case for you.
Did you consider writing this post as part of your work, for example? Or reading EA posts? Or reading any blog or article about philosophy of mind, AI and so on? I guess you consider the work coordinating the digital minds group as part of your (paid) work, right? Where do you set the boundary. Or better, how do you set the boundary?
I really struggle with that. It is often not very relevant to clearly distinguish what is actual work and what it is not, but other times it is. In addition, it is not strange that something that started as ‘for fun’ ends being part of your research or main working activity (e.g. the digital minds group for you).

mikbp 17 Dec 2021 10:37 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: tobytrem’s comment on: Response to Recent Criticisms of Longtermism
But if his text is so bad, why should anyone feel “icky” about longtermism because of it? Although I’m by far not stranger to longtermism (I’m here!), I’m really not too much into EA and I’m not a phylosopher nor have I studied it ever, so my theoretical knowledge of the topic is limited, and when I read Torres’ texts it is clear to me that they don’t really hold.
When I’m interested in one topic for which I’m not really qualified to know if what I read/hear about it holds true or is one sided, I tend to search for criticisms about it to check. What I’ve read from Torres or linked by him about longtermism, actually make me think that it seems to be difficult to fairly criticise longtermism.
I think reading Torres’ texts may well turn people away if they don’t really know much else about the topic, but “getting more people to read the original [Torres’ paper]” after having read a good piece shouldn’t be a problem.
And coming back to my starting question, if a person who has good information sources feel “icky” about a topic because of a bad piece of information, maybe it is okay that he/she is not too involved in the topic, no?

mikbp 16 Feb 2022 17:16 UTC
5 points
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on: Risks from Asteroids
I find this post very interesting. However, I don’t think the dual-use should worry us much. I cannot estimate how much harder it is in general to divert an asteroid toward Earth than away from it, but I can confidently say that it is several orders of magnitude higher than 10x (the precision needed would be staggering). In addition, to divert an asteroid toward Earth, one needs an asteroid. The closer the better. The fact that the risk of a big-enough asteroid hitting the Earth is so low indicates that there are not too many candidates. This factor has to be taken into account as well.
But, even if diverting an asteroid towards the Earth would be only 10 times harder than diverting it from the Earth, dual-use does not need to be a big concern. To actually manage to divert an asteroid towards the Earth one does not only need to divert it, one also needs to prevent the rest of humanity from diverting it away on time, which is much easier. So, as long as a small bunch of independent institutions are able and ready to divert asteroids, dual-use does not seem a concern to me.
What links here?
- mikbp's comment on NASA will re-direct an asteroid tonight as a test for planetary defence (link-post) by Ben Stewart (1 Oct 2022 19:23 UTC; 1 point)

mikbp 23 Feb 2022 23:16 UTC
1 point
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on: Parenting: Things I wish I could tell my past self
Nice post. We do something similar to the sleep shifts but in synch. If you have enough space, it is worth having a second bed or a sofa large enough for a person to sleep with the baby in a separate room. Then, one of the couple can sleep with the baby and take care of its needs while the other one sleeps more or less unperturbed. You can change roles as it fits you. At the beginning, while the baby doesn’t need much milk it is quite easy to pump the amount needed for the night. For us, after ~2 months this was impractical.

What we now (week 13) do is that usually I sleep with the baby and when he gets hungry I go to the bedroom so that my partner feeds him. When they have finished, I take the baby back so that my partner can sleep again more or less undisturbed for a couple of hours more. Then, when the baby gets hungry and it is 5:30 or later, we (baby and me) stay in the bedroom and my partner takes care of the baby from then on. Often i only have to wake her twice in one night. My partner can sleep much better and when I need to recover, she takes care of the baby for a night.

mikbp 28 Feb 2022 9:14 UTC
1 point
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on: A Day in the Life of a Parent
“With children it is always hard to know what is due to luck, or genetics, or your parenting” :-)

mikbp 2 Mar 2022 18:17 UTC
3 points
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on: 23 career choice heuristics
I’m confused by
Be a founder—do something that involves starting a company
what is the added value of starting a company? I mean, if what you want to do is not done by anyone, badly done, you think you could do it better, etc, it makes total sense. But I don’t think that founding a company intrinsically adds value. Additionally, starting a company is something with high risk of failure and so overwhelming that you basically cannot do anything for quite a long time.
Another thing is choosing a path to impact that is being a serial entrepreneur: starting one company has a high risk of failure, but also high expected returns if you succeed. Being a serial entrepreneur leverages on the experience obtained during all the possible failures to eventually achieve high returns. I’m really not sure that, on average, the experience obtained by starting a (one) company—unless you have a great idea that maximises the options to succeed—outweighs the opportunity costs it entails.

mikbp 4 Mar 2022 14:02 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Jack R’s comment on: 23 career choice heuristics
“I don’t mean to say the heuristic always holds” I understand that, I’m not going that way.

“on average, lead to better outcomes” That’s what in this case I don’t see. Starting a company entails a large opportunity cost—you can basically not do anything else for a period of time—coupled with a large chance of failing. My intuition is that, as a general advice, it may well be net negative, at least as personal advise.

Now I see that it may well not be net negative in the aggregate if the successful instances more than compensate the failures, so it may be a good community heuristic. Was that your idea?

When I read the post, I interpreted this list as heuristics addressed to individuals, not community heuristics.

mikbp 15 Mar 2022 21:15 UTC
1 point
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on: Against anti-natalism; or: why climate change should not be a significant factor in your decision to have children
“Assuming your potential children live average lives, they’ll probably experience a lot more happiness than suffering and their lives will be well worth living.”

I think this is assuming a lot. The point of not having progeny in the climate change argument, is to preserve the possibility for other humans to have such happy lives. Having progeny, in that argument, is what actually challenges this assumption. It is problematic to argue that average happiness within rampant climate change will be higher or lower than average suffering. But what it is plainly wrong is to argue that they won’t be substantially worse than today.

For me, your argument reads very similar to something like: it is fine that you cut more trees than your share (share being calculated so that new trees can replenish the forest) if the happiness gained is large enough. Well, this is fine until there are no trees left. In other words, it very much seems like an example of tragedy-of-the-commons-thinking.

A different issue is whether or not having progeny exacerbates climate change, but this is not what you challenge.

mikbp 20 Mar 2022 13:07 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: ben.smith’s comment on: Against anti-natalism; or: why climate change should not be a significant factor in your decision to have children
Have I understood your argument right?
Yes, but 2 applies to rampant CC (climate change) and 1 within the CC argument.
If I understand it right, your reply challenges the idea that the net effect of having progeny is exacerbate CC, at least in the long run, which I thought you deliberately intended not to do in the post. I think this is a completely different argument, one that I don’t want to go to because it lacks any end: CC is a continuum, its effects are not linear, tipping points are not well understood, its effects will knock-on other effects, it all depends on technology and infrastructure (effective EROIs from alternatives to fossil fuels are lower than we could wish, it is at least very hard to change the infrastructure of the whole society to accommodate a complete change in energy sources, carbon capture and storage at scale may be possible or may not...), unknown unknowns...
I guess my central point was that you cannot argue that CC should not be a significant factor deciding on having children or not (if you care for total happiness), without arguing whether having children is something that will effectively exacerbate CC in the long run or not. And I think you were trying to do that.
If having children does effectively exacerbate CC in the long run, even if its effects in the happiness of the very next (few?) generation(s) may still be net-positive, in the long run this is overwhelmingly negative (in the far off limit, Earth is like Venus). If having children does not effectively exacerbate CC in the long run, there is no debate. And everything in between (now it does but later not, it does but up to a certain point, it does but actual human population will decrease...) is a hugely messy debate.
BTW, the GDP calculations are useless without knowing its assumptions. And if they come from Nordhaus, his calculations seem to be really, really bad, with utterly unrealistic assumptions. Things like calculating the differences in GDP of regions with, XºC average temperature difference and extrapolating it to CC without accounting, for example, that many regions on Earth will be inhabitable if their average temperature increases XºC. Note that, although he’s got a Nobel price for it, basically no one in fields related to sustainability research (except for some economists, I guess) accept them.

mikbp 22 Mar 2022 22:43 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: ben.smith’s comment on: Against anti-natalism; or: why climate change should not be a significant factor in your decision to have children
Hi. Thinking about it, I probably overstated a bit about Nordhaus’ acceptance. Instead of saying “basically no one in fields related to sustainability research” I think “many do not” is probably more accurate. I’m in my bubble and there may be very different bubbles around. And I guess a bad model is better than no model, as one can improve it instead of starting from scratch.
About what you ask for:
(a) I’m not sure. Steve Keen (@ProfSteveKeen in Twitter) is very vocal about how bad Nordhause’s model is, maybe he’s got something. But (rightly) pointing that something is wrong is much easier than building something better, so I’m not sure if he’s got anything. I know he was working on one (several?) paper(s) with Tim Garrett. But Tim is physicist, so it may be something beyond GDP (Tim has a model showing that ~~CO2 emissions~~ energy demand correlates very well with historically cumulative GDP somehow implying that we are actually not decoupling from resource needs).
In general, the problem is that any meaningful CC will have knock-on effects that are ultimately impossible to predict. One can put numbers on those, but then for each $Δ$ Temp there have to be at least different scenarios (only $Δ$ Temp, plus X damage from more extreme environmental phenomena, plus Y effect of war, plus Z from migrations, combinations, degrees...). And on top of that, there are unknown unknowns (e.g. last summer hat heatwaves that melted infrastructure in some parts of the US [I think], which AFAIK basically no one had predicted).
(b) and (c)… maybe the people in the SCER and in the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute? These folks study knock-on effects that CC could produce. Beard from SCER spoke about it in the FLI podcast and I think Luke Kempt also has worked on related topics. I’m less familiar with the people in GCRI. But in general, these all look at overwhelmingly-negative scenarios (CC triggering a nuclear war and so on), so it sounds like what you want.
I hope this helps.

mikbp 4 May 2022 8:58 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: ZachWeems’s comment on: Response to Recent Criticisms of Longtermism
It is long time ago now, but I don’t remember having the feeling that he linked longtermism to the far right in that text. I don’t know about in other places.

mikbp 8 Sep 2022 20:29 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Democratising Risk—or how EA deals with critics
I really appreciate your effort defending a paper containing parts you strongly disagree with from (what you consider) bad arguments!

mikbp 9 Sep 2022 18:21 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: Climate Change & Longtermism: new book-length report
About planetary boundaries:
Leaving aside the discussions on the specific value and/or variable used to measure a specific boundary -which the authors themselves caveat that may be temporal until finding better ones-, isn’t most of the controversy due to critiques conflating planetary boundaries and tipping points?

mikbp 13 Sep 2022 6:44 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: The discount rate is not zero
[Epistemic status: I have just read the summary of the post by the author and by Zoe Williams]

Doesn’t it make more sense to just set the discount rate dynamically accounting for the current (at the present) estimations?

If/when we reach a point where the long-term existential catastrophe rate approaches zero, then it will be the moment to set the discount rate to zero. Now it is not, so the discount rate should be higher as the author proposes.

Is there a reason for not using in a dynamic discount rate?

mikbp 14 Sep 2022 12:33 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Linch’s comment on: The discount rate is not zero
But the underestimation would be temporal.
I’m also not clear on whether this is practically relevant or not.

mikbp 1 Oct 2022 19:09 UTC
1 point
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on: Does Economic Growth Meaningfully Improve Well-being? An Optimistic Re-Analysis of Easterlin’s Research: Founders Pledge
I really don’t understand the results of point 1. I guess I miss something.
Easterlin’s estimates include many countries, including a significant number of economically strong countries, right? And cash transfers are directed to the very poor, aren’t they? If so, I really don’t understand how the increase in happiness due to cash transfers is not much higher than that of Easterlin’s estimates (or at least significantly higher if only a small fraction of the countries included are rich). Isn’t it well established that the effect of wealth in happiness is much stronger for poorer people? What am I missing?

mikbp 1 Oct 2022 19:23 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: DC’s comment on: NASA will re-direct an asteroid tonight as a test for planetary defence (link-post)
I really don’t think dual use is in any way worrisome if humanity has several institutions capable of asteroid deflection, and a tiny one if there is only one. Quoting a comment I gave to finm in his post on asteroid risks:
I don’t think the dual-use should worry us much. I cannot estimate how much harder it is in general to divert an asteroid toward Earth than away from it, but I can confidently say that it is several orders of magnitude higher than 10x [figure finm gives as example in his text] (the precision needed would be staggering). In addition, to divert an asteroid toward Earth, one needs an asteroid. The closer the better. The fact that the risk of a big-enough asteroid hitting the Earth is so low indicates that there are not too many candidates. This factor has to be taken into account as well.
But, even if diverting an asteroid towards the Earth would be only 10 times harder than diverting it from the Earth, dual-use does not need to be a big concern. To actually manage to divert an asteroid towards the Earth one does not only need to divert it, one also needs to prevent the rest of humanity from diverting it away on time, which is much easier. So, as long as a small bunch of independent institutions are able and ready to divert asteroids, dual-use does not seem a concern to me.

mikbp 3 Oct 2022 8:53 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Vadim Albinsky’s comment on: Does Economic Growth Meaningfully Improve Well-being? An Optimistic Re-Analysis of Easterlin’s Research: Founders Pledge
Thanks for the answer. I was referring to 2. I thought it was something we’ll established. But I think I was so convinced of it because I did not think much about and I probably conflated it with 1 as well.

mikbp 21 Jan 2023 12:37 UTC
3 points
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on: Getting on a different train: can Effective Altruism avoid collapsing into absurdity?
[I just quickly listened to the post and I’m not philosopher, nor I know deeply about Ergodicity Economics]
Maybe Ergodicity Economics (EE) [site, wikipedia] could be relevant here? It is relevant for the St. Petersburg experiment. It has to do with expected values of stochastic processes not being equal to their time averages (ensemble average ≠ time average).
I am sure there is much more to EE than this, but the one insight that I took from it when I got to know about EE is that when one of the outcomes of the game is to lose everything, expected value does not do a good job describing it. And, at least for x-risks this is exactly the case (and I consider catastrophic risks also in this domain).
It seems that EE is not very well known in the EA community, at least the term is almost not mentioned in the forum, so I thought I would mention it here in case anyone wants to dig in more. I’m for sure not the better trained to go deeper into it nor do I have the time to attempt to do it.
One post that seems to address the issue of EE within the EA is this one.
I hope this is a good lead!