As for “epistemic health,” my update somewhat after ~6mo of forecasting was: “ugh, why some many people at GJO/Foretell are so bad to terribly bad. I am not doing anything notably high-effort, why am/are I/we doing so well?” Which made me notably less deferent to community consensus and less modest generally (as in modest epistemology). I want to put some appropriate qualifiers but it feels like too much effort. I judge this update as a significant personal ~benefit.
Misha_Yagudin(Misha Yagudin)
Karma: 766
Giving a kidney in exchange for money sounds less “exploitative” (I don’t think it is, I am modeling public perception) than providing a kidney in exchange for beauty surgery because expectations are more explicit for money than a beauty surgery.
I think this is basically because
People in need of such surgery are either “irrationally” obsessed with their body image or in need of medical intervention they can’t afford.
I imagine giving a kidney in exchange for fat removal will be more regretful:
Receiving money is a reasonably straightforward/bounded event [e.g., not “wasting money” afterward is personal responsibility].
While fat removal implicitly sells persistent results. Getting weight back is plausible, and people are likely to misprice the risks due to wishful thinking. Also, incentives are pretty asymmetric, so “I was misled about efficacy” might be a common complaint.
I anticipate that some people who were excluded from participation due to covid policy are unhappy with it and are not counted in the survey. I know at least a few people who were accepted but were not able to participate because being vaccinated with Sputnik V is not enough. That said, the EAG coronavirus policy is understandable; and people are unhappy in a different way than OP.
Thanks! This all makes sense to me.
Thanks for bringing this up; I heard (and tried) something like that under a name of a mastermind group.
Somewhat relatedly Ben Kuhn has an excellent blog post on doing one-on-ones with close friends/partners.
I have been doing them for a few years now and they have been very helpful. As of now, we have a 90-minute weekly session where we coach each other in turns; at various points, we did all of the techniques mentioned by OP but the core focus has always been on an extensive weekly review and planning.
There are problems with doing coaching/therapy-like stuff with friends: you might mess up relationships a bit; people might not be skilled enough to make the practice useful. On the other hand, these reviews can improve your friendship and are basically free (it is free as it doesn’t cost anything, and is sorta free as you probably want to hang out with your friend either way). In our case, the weekly reviews made us closer friends (which is enough to justify it); and are generally highly valued by both of us as productivity/mental health aid.
I can imagine working with a coach leading to additional gains [via learning new techniques, getting pumped by trying something new, &c] but the current setup feels like at least an 80⁄20 option. One reservation I have about posting this is that my partner is an outlier in how much he cares about his productivity.
re: footnote 1
The paper The Standard Errors of Persistence, you cite as a criticism says the following about the robustness of Peruan study:
This study examines differences in household consumption and child stunting on either side of Peru’s Mitaboundary. It finds that areas which traditionally had to provide conscripted mine labour have household consumption almost 30 per centlower than on the other side of the boundary. We examine the regression in column 1 of Table 2, which compares equivalent household consumption in a hundred kilometre strip on either side of the boundary with controls for distance to the boundary, elevation, slope and household characteristics. The variable of interest is a dummy for being inside the boundary. We examine here how well the regression explains arbitrary patterns of consumption generated as spatial noise. To do this we take the locations where households live and simulate consumption levels based on median consumption at the points. The original study found a 28 per cent difference in consumption levels across the historic boundary. If we normalize the noise variables to have the same mean and standard deviation as the original consumption data, we get a difference of at least 28 per cent (positive or negative) in 70 per cent of cases.
What do you think of that? In general, it seems that your justification for relative robustness doesn’t engage with the critiques at all. My understanding of their major point is that spatial autocorrelations of residuals are unaccounted for and might make noise look significant. The simpler example of a common spurious relationship was, AFIAK, first described in Spurious regressions in econometrics (see this decently looking blogpost for relevant intuitions).
I endorse Nuño’s comment re: 0.00000000001%.
While it’s pretty easy to agree that a probability of a stupid mistake/typo is greater than 0.00000000001%, it is sometimes hard to follow in practice. I think Yudkowsky communicates it’s well on a more visceral level in his Infinite Certainty essay. I got to another level of appreciation of this point after doing a calibration exercise for mental arithmetics — all errors were unpredictable “oups” like misreading plus for minus or selecting the wrong answer after making correct calculations.
For social technology, I think we have been consistently disappointed by various attempts to reform education. Specifically, think about interventions like direct instruction investigated under the Follow Through project and, maybe, intervention tested by Gates Foundation.
I would be happy if people started more specialized newsletters.
Think of Nuño’s Forecasting Newsletter but for other areas of EA/longtermist interests (e.g. broad topics from various research agendas). This seems to be straightforwardly positive per the neoliberal movement growth playbook. On top of doing community service of keeping peers up to date with relevant research; a newsletter is a pretty nice way to get relevant connections outside of the EA movement, to do low-risk high-fidelity outreach to a target demographic of people interested in high-priority causes, to gain reputation and status, and to practice core research skill of writing well.
If newsletters will bloom, it might be worth it to hire someone to help with production. Would be kinda cool to call this network The Republic of Newsletters :)
Great! I broadly endorse the above virtues and can’t say much on the object level. On meta-level, I am curious about how do you think about the impact of this paper. I have certain guesses:
The paper’s conclusion says: “We hope that it should inspire a debate among philosophers and psychologists about what virtues utilitarians should prioritize the most.” Is that it?
Or are you aiming at figuring out recommendations for EAs to follow (akin to CEA’s Guiding principles and Lucius Caviola’s talk Against naive effective altruism)?
Or maybe you want to re-associate utilitarianism with nice/warm virtues because it appears cold to some (like Bleeding Heart Libertarians was reframing libertarianism)?
I think David Nash does something similar with his EA Updates (here is the most recent one). While most of the links are focused on EA Forum and posts by EA/EA-adj orgs, he features occasional links from other venues.
You might be interested in checking out Ingredients for creating disruptive research teams e.g. on vision, autonomy, spaces for interaction.
I would be happy to hear stories of people becoming significantly less longtermist. What changed their minds?
Mission drift in Gates foundation makes me somewhat more skeptical of patient longtermist. I mean, maybe a patient philanthropist’s discounting/expropriation rate shouldn’t be too low.
I guess (p=.75) Nuño would say that the following interpretation is mostly reasonable: “inside view” here means that Nuño presents his impressions which rely a lot on stories he tells himself about various research directions being valuable or not, which others might reasonably disagree with him about.
I am thinking that because Nuño uses a simple model to estimate a fraction of researchers doing “valuable” work, the subjectivity is rooted in his takes on how valuable their individual research directions are.
[Phrasing this kinda weirdly as I want to get a visceral update on my belief in “when thinking is clearly described, I can guess that the author means by inside/outside view.” I also think that (p=.33) Nuño was just not very careful and will say something like “I have no idea what I really meant at the time of writing it.”]
Thank you for a speedy reply, Markus! Jade makes three major points (see the attached slide). I would appreciate your high-level impressions on these (if you lack time reporting oneliners like “mostly agree” or “too much nuance to settle on oneliner” still would be valuable).
If you’d take time to elaborate on any of these, I would prefer the last one. Specifically on:
What are the reasons why them preemptively engaging is likely to lead to prosocial regulation? [emphasis mine] Two reasons why. One: the rationale for a firm would be something like, “We should be doing the thing that governance will want us to do, so that they don’t then go in and put in regulation that is not good for us.” And if you assume that governance has that incentive structure to deliver on public goods, then firms, at the very least, will converge on the idea that they should be mitigating their externalities and delivering on prosocial outcomes in the same way that the state regulation probably would. The more salient one in the case of AI is that public opinion actually plays a fairly large role in dictating what firms think are prosocial. [...]
(Hey Max, consider reposting this to goodreads if you are on the platform.)
Here is a very interesting perspective on EA as part of leftish analytical philosophy (under R/Neoliberal): https://sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-anglo-american-analytic-philosophy.html
I haven’t thought much about it but It seems that building stronger ties with Red Plenty might be useful strategically (for movement resilience) and we are not at all incompatible:
I think there are good insights there that are quite appreciated here (e.g., legibility);
I think it’s reasonable to incorporate some of their though into evaluation (e.g., IDinsight studied beneficiary preferences for GiveWell).