Milan_Griffes

• Milan_Griffes 23 Jun 2020 17:08 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: MichaelPlant’s comment on: HLI’s Men­tal Health Pro­gramme Eval­u­a­tion Pro­ject—Up­date on the First Round of Evaluation

  Note they are mostly to do with in­surance is­sues.

  fwiw I don’t think most of this prob­lem is due to in­surance is­sues, though I agree that the US health­care sys­tem is very weird and falls short in a lot of ways.

  
  

  This also isn’t spe­cific to men­tal health: one might re­tort to donors to AMF that they should be fund­ing im­prove­ments in (say) health treat­ment in gen­eral or malaria treat­ment in par­tic­u­lar.

  I don’t think this anal­ogy holds up: we’ve erad­i­cated malaria in many de­vel­oped coun­tries, but we haven’t figured out men­tal health to the same de­gree (e.g. 1 in 5 Amer­i­cans have a men­tal ill­ness).

  
  

  I sus­pect that if there were a re­ally strong ‘pull’ for goods/​ser­vices to be pro­vided, then we would already have ‘solved’ world poverty, which makes me think dis­tri­bu­tion is weakly re­lated to in­no­va­tion.

  World poverty has been de­creas­ing a lot since 1990 – some good charts here & here.

  M-Pesa and the broad pen­e­tra­tion of smart­phones are ex­am­ples of in­no­va­tions that were quickly dis­tributed. The path from in­no­va­tion to dis­tri­bu­tion is prob­a­bly harder for ser­vices.

• Milan_Griffes 15 Jun 2020 19:17 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Aaron Gertler’s comment on: [Link] “Will He Go?” book re­view (Scott Aaron­son)

  I usu­ally do link posts to im­prove the com­mu­nity’s situ­a­tional aware­ness.

  This is up­stream of ad­vo­cat­ing for spe­cific ac­tions, though it’s definitely part of that causal chain.

• Milan_Griffes 15 Jun 2020 17:03 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: MichaelPlant’s comment on: HLI’s Men­tal Health Pro­gramme Eval­u­a­tion Pro­ject—Up­date on the First Round of Evaluation

  I’m not sure what you mean by go­ing from 0 to 1 vs 1 to n. Can you elab­o­rate?

  The link in my top-level com­ment elab­o­rates the con­cept.

  
  

  how much bet­ter MH treat­ment could be than the cur­rent best practice

  Quick re­ply: prob­a­bly a lot bet­ter. See ec­static med­i­ta­tive states, con­firmed by fMRI & EEG.

  See also Slate Star Codex on the weird­ness of Western men­tal health­care: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

  
  

  how easy it would be to get it there

  Quick re­ply: not sure about how easy it would be to achieve the pla­tonic ideal of men­tal health­care – QRI is prob­a­bly more opinionated about this.

  Given how much of an im­prove­ment SSRIs and CBT were over the pre­ex­ist­ing stan­dard-of-care, and how much of an im­prove­ment psychedelic, ke­tamine, and so­matic ther­a­pies seem to be over the cur­rent stan­dard-of-care, I’d guess that we’re nowhere close to hit­ting diminish­ing marginal re­turns.

  
  

  how fast this would spread

  Quick re­ply: if global­iza­tion con­tinues, the best prac­tices of the global­ized so­ciety will prop­a­gate “nat­u­rally” (i.e. as a re­sult of the in­cen­tives stake­hold­ers face). From this per­spec­tive, we’re more limited by get­ting the global­ized best prac­tices right than we are by dis­tribut­ing our cur­rent best prac­tices.

• Milan_Griffes 15 Jun 2020 16:46 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Aaron Gertler’s comment on: [Link] “Will He Go?” book re­view (Scott Aaron­son)

  From the part I ex­cerpted:

  “You should read it right now (or at least read this Vox in­ter­view), if you want to think through the con­tours of a civ­i­liza­tional Sin­gu­lar­ity that seems at least as plau­si­ble to me as the AI Sin­gu­lar­ity, but whose fixed date of Novem­ber 3, 2020 we’re now hurtling to­ward.”

  
  

  The EA im­pli­ca­tions of the 2020 US pres­i­den­tial elec­tion seem ob­vi­ous?

  See also Dustin & Cari’s $20m grant to the 2016 Clin­ton cam­paign.

• Milan_Griffes 12 Jun 2020 23:45 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: Mathi­asKirkBonde’s Shortform

  My guess is that it’s more effi­cient to study full time while liv­ing in the coun­try. I think liv­ing there in­creases mo­ti­va­tion, means you learn what you ac­tu­ally need, means you learn a bunch ‘pas­sively’, and lets you prac­tice con­ver­sa­tion a lot, which is bet­ter than most book learn­ing, and you learn more of the cul­ture.

  +1

  Be­ing there definitely in­creased my mo­ti­va­tion to learn the lan­guage, even though I didn’t know any Chi­nese be­fore­hand and wasn’t in­tend­ing to learn any.

[Link] “Will He Go?” book re­view (Scott Aaron­son)

• Milan_Griffes 12 Jun 2020 19:33 UTC

  5 points

  on: HLI’s Men­tal Health Pro­gramme Eval­u­a­tion Pro­ject—Up­date on the First Round of Evaluation

  We ap­pre­ci­ated the fo­cus on LMICs be­cause the treat­ment gap for men­tal health con­di­tions is es­pe­cially high in these coun­tries (WHO Men­tal Health At­las, 2017), par­tic­u­larly in low-re­source (e.g. ru­ral) set­tings.

  
  

  What do you make of the ar­gu­ment that it’s more im­por­tant to go from 0 to 1 on men­tal health, rather than from 1 to n ?

  Could imag­ine that men­tal health in de­vel­op­ing coun­tries will re­sem­ble men­tal health in de­vel­oped coun­tries more and more as a re­sult of eco­nomic growth. Devel­op­ing coun­tries be­come more similar to de­vel­oped coun­tries over­all, and adopt the best men­tal health­care prac­tices of de­vel­oped coun­tries as part of this.

  If men­tal health in de­vel­oped coun­tries cur­rently misses out on a lot of up­side, it would be way more lev­er­aged to fo­cus on re­al­iz­ing that up­side (0 to 1), rather than prop­a­gat­ing cur­rent best prac­tices (1 to n), be­cause the best prac­tices will prop­a­gate re­gard­less so long as the de­vel­op­ing world con­tinues to de­velop.

• Milan_Griffes 4 Jun 2020 20:54 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Denis Drescher’s comment on: What are the lead­ing cri­tiques of “longter­mism” and re­lated concepts

  My es­say on con­se­quen­tial­ist clue­less­ness is also about this: What con­se­quences?

• Milan_Griffes 27 May 2020 22:19 UTC

  2 points

  on: EA Sur­vey: Sex­ual Harass­ment Ques­tions—Feed­back Requested

  Post­ing these links here for cross-refer­ence:

  • Re­mem­ber­ing the pass­ing of Kathy Forth (a)

  • If I Can’t Have Me, No One Can (a) [Con­tent warn­ing: a suicide note that deals heav­ily with sex­ual vi­o­lence]

• Milan_Griffes 27 May 2020 22:17 UTC

  3 points

  on: An Ex­plo­ra­tion of Sex­ual Violence Re­duc­tion for Effec­tive Altru­ism Potential

  Post­ing these links here for cross-refer­ence:

  • Re­mem­ber­ing the pass­ing of Kathy Forth (a)

  • If I Can’t Have Me, No One Can (a) [Con­tent warn­ing: a suicide note that deals heav­ily with sex­ual vi­o­lence]

• Milan_Griffes 21 May 2020 16:22 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: David_Althaus’s comment on: Re­duc­ing long-term risks from malev­olent actors

  Over­all, my sense is that MDMA and psychedelics might have a chance to sub­stan­tially de­crease malev­olent traits if these sub­stances are taken with the right in­ten­tions and in a good set­ting—ideally in a ther­a­peu­tic set­ting with an ex­pe­rienced guide. The biggest prob­lem I see is that most malev­olent peo­ple likely won’t be in­ter­ested in tak­ing MDMA and psychedelics in this way.

  
  

  Our es­ti­mates of the like­li­hood of malev­olent peo­ple be­ing in­ter­ested prob­a­bly hinge on our the­ory of where malev­olence comes from.

  e.g. if we think malev­olence mostly arises as a mal­adap­tive cop­ing re­sponse to early trauma, you could imag­ine in­ter­ven­tions that re­solve the trauma and re­place the mal­adap­tive re­sponse with a more proso­cial & equally fit re­sponse (and malev­olent peo­ple be­ing in­ter­ested in those in­ter­ven­tions).

  But if we think malev­olence is mostly a ge­net­i­cally-me­di­ated trait, it’s prob­a­bly harder to change.

  I haven’t poked the liter­a­ture on this yet.

• Milan_Griffes 20 May 2020 17:13 UTC

  12 points

  on: [Link] “Cut­ting through spiritual colo­nial­ism”

  I wrote up a steel­man sum­mary of Gupta’s po­si­tion on an­other thread af­ter some­one pointed out that cap­i­tal­ism is just a co­or­di­na­tion mechanism (and one that is over­all bet­ter than the other co­or­di­na­tion mechanisms we’ve tried).

  Here’s the sum­mary:

  • Western so­ciety used to be pretty bad at co­or­di­nat­ing, but had a ba­sic mean­ing-mak­ing ori­en­ta­tion (Chris­ti­an­ity) and func­tional meth­ods of laun­der­ing per­sonal re­spon­si­bil­ity (e.g. Catholic con­fes­sion, e.g. Protes­tant pre­des­ti­na­tion).

  • With in­dus­tri­al­iza­tion, and then again with the com­put­ing rev­olu­tion, west­ern so­ciety got a lot bet­ter at co­or­di­nat­ing.

  • Alongside in­dus­tri­al­iza­tion & mod­ern­iza­tion, west­ern so­ciety be­gan to lose its mean­ing-mak­ing ori­en­ta­tion and its meth­ods of laun­der­ing re­spon­si­bil­ity be­gan to lose effi­cacy.

  • So now we’re in a place where we’re much bet­ter at co­or­di­nat­ing than we were be­fore, but we don’t have whole­some tar­gets to co­or­di­nate to­wards, and we’re for the most part op­er­at­ing as though our legacy struc­tures of man­ag­ing per­sonal re­spon­si­bil­ity are still in­tact.

    • This is bad.

  • Lately some of our co­or­di­nat­ing power has turned to­wards “coloniz­ing” spiritual prac­tices of other cul­tures, i.e. it’s try­ing to adopt a ver­sion of them that could re­place our legacy per­sonal-re­spon­si­bil­ity-man­age­ment struc­tures.

    • This isn’t go­ing very well, be­cause the spiritual struc­tures we’re in­ter­ested in are a fun­da­men­tally differ­ent shape than the ones we’re try­ing to re­place, and we’re more in­ter­ested in shoe­horn­ing the new (from our per­spec­tive) struc­tures into the legacy forms rather than adapt­ing our ex­pec­ta­tions to the new struc­tures (adapt­ing our ex­pec­ta­tions would be much harder).

  
  

  This all rhymes with Ver­vaeke’s stuff (though I haven’t gone deep down the Ver­vaeke-hole yet).
  Also rhymes with The Wizard and the Prophet (Gupta is a hard­core prophet, in that fram­ing).

[Link] “Cut­ting through spiritual colo­nial­ism”

• Milan_Griffes 11 May 2020 19:26 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: What should Founders Pledge re­search?

  Thank you for do­ing this! I was ex­cited to see your piece, and have been think­ing about it.

• Milan_Griffes 7 May 2020 19:21 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: MichaelPlant’s comment on: Re­duc­ing long-term risks from malev­olent actors

  Re­gard­ing ob­jec­tive mea­sures, there will be ‘Minor­ity Re­port’ style ob­jec­tions to ac­tu­ally us­ing them in ad­vance, even if they have high pre­dic­tive power (which might be tricky as it re­lies on col­lect­ing good data, which seems to re­quire the con­sent of the malev­olent).

  You could imag­ine sce­nar­ios where we ap­ply ob­jec­tive mea­sures to chil­dren, em­bryos, and/​or cou­ples who are con­sid­er­ing hav­ing chil­dren.

  This would avoid some of the free-choice prob­lem around who takes the test, though it doesn’t re­ally get around the Minor­ity Re­port prob­lem. Also there’d still be se­lec­tion at the par­ent level (some would-be par­ents would de­cide to not get tested).

  In­ter­est­ing that we don’t do any­thing like this for psy­chopa­thy cur­rently, as far as I know. (Psy­chopa­thy ap­pears to be some­what ge­netic.)

• Milan_Griffes 3 May 2020 14:33 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Ra­cial De­mo­graph­ics at Longter­mist Organizations

  Whether we as­sume con­flict the­ory or mis­take the­ory is also rele­vant here.

• Milan_Griffes 2 May 2020 20:31 UTC

  2 points

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

  The In­sti­tu­tional In­vestor hy­per­link is bro­ken. Here’s one that works: https://​​www.in­sti­tu­tion­al­in­vestor.com/​​ar­ti­cle/​​b1j0mvcy9792vt/​​Why-Value-In­vest­ing-Sucks

• Milan_Griffes 2 May 2020 17:12 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Ra­cial De­mo­graph­ics at Longter­mist Organizations

  I would also hope for this!

  It feels fraught though – Chi­nese lead­er­ship seems to have a very differ­ent view of what con­sti­tutes the good, and a very differ­ent vi­sion for the fu­ture.

• Milan_Griffes 1 May 2020 17:15 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Milan_Griffes’s comment on: Ra­cial De­mo­graph­ics at Longter­mist Organizations

  Con­sid­er­ing the re­verse sharp­ens the point fur­ther:

  “If a Chi­nese think tank, funded by a founder of Ten­cent (or Huawei, etc.), con­vened a con­sor­tium of AI prac­ti­tion­ers & policy wonks (al­most all of whom were racially & na­tion­ally Chi­nese), and this con­sor­tium pro­duced recom­men­da­tions on how to dis­tribute the benefits of AI for the com­mon good, what would the EA com­mu­nity think of that work?”

• Milan_Griffes 1 May 2020 16:40 UTC

  16 points

  on: Ra­cial De­mo­graph­ics at Longter­mist Organizations

  If you were an AI strate­gist in China, and knew that Asi­ans out­num­bered whites in many top CS pro­grams in the US, would you be skep­ti­cal about an over­whelm­ingly white ecosys­tem pro­duc­ing re­search on top­ics like “dis­tribut­ing the benefits of AI for the com­mon good”?

  This is a great point.