Builds web apps (eg viewpoints.xyz) and makes forecasts. Currently I have spare capacity.
Nathan Young
Karma: 17,655
There is pretty solid evidence that sports gambling legalisation leads to increased intimate partner violence.
I am pretty sure I thought this, yes. That’s how it is in the UK. And all prediction markets push in this direction. I thought that the benefits would outweigh the costs, but I am less confident of that now. (Though I think the benfits are huge, really really large)
I weakly support regulation of huge sports gambling losses which seems very possible to do.
[COI: I work at the Swift Centre as a forecaster, I have worked for a prediction market, I am very involved in forecasting. It is not my current work however, which is on community notes]
A few things points attempting to say things other commenters haven’t, though I largely agree with the critical comments and the things they agree with Marcus on:
I agree that the $100M doesn’t seem super well allocated. Not because forecasting is useless, but because the money flowed to big institutions and platforms rather than smaller, weirder, mechanism-design bets. I like Metaculus, but it has absorbed a lot of money in the last 5 years and not clearly changed much. I don’t know if I think FRI has been worth it, I am glad someone has done the research but, again, how much are we talking? I would have preferred smaller projects were funded on the margin. Coefficient’s strategy in forecasting has felt poor to me, often ignoring the community who in my view come up with the most interesting projects and going for marginal spending on incumbents.
Nobody funds mechanism design or institutional epistemics. I recently spoke to someone at a household name enormous tech company who described their institutional process. It was almost unbelievably dysfunctional to me. Who is funding the work to help institutions think better? It doesn’t promise near-term wins and frankly should’t be the priority of any non-research org. So basically no one. Forecasting is an attempt. How much value is there in the joint stock company, or in democracy. To me, that’s what we are talking about. Figuring out fundamentally better ways of making decisions. It is a problem at scale, it is neglected, and given the deregulation of prediction markets, tractable (though maybe bad, more later).
On “feels useful when it isn’t” (point 6). I don’t entirely disagree. I deliberately try not to spend time forecasting unless I’m being paid to. It can be a distraction. Where I disagree is that some forecasting is genuinely mentally sharpening, at least for me as a thinking discipline. And I think it’s a not unreasonable status hierarchy. Do I endorse the status that Peter Wildeford or Eli Leifland have gotten from forecasting? Yes. Frankly, who do I not endorse having got status from being a forecaster?
Why don’t AI 2027 and Ajeya count? Tangible forecasting outputs that demonstrably moved discourse and decision-making. Why don’t these count as valuable forecasting outputs. AI 2027 is clearly informed by judgemental forecasters and was read by (I think) the Vice President. Habryka said something like ‘too much time has been wasted down the resolution criteria mines’ and I disagree but even if one agrees, I’m not sure even he thinks the whole field is a waste of time.Prediction markets may be net-harmful, but not useless. I’ve said publicly I’m less sure PMs are net-positive — bankruptcies and intimate partner violence are real and huge problems that may be as large as any coordinaton benefits. But ‘bad on net’ and ‘useless’ are different claims, and the later seems more obviously incorrect to me. I would be more interested in a post entitled “EA forecasting efforts have caused massive harm”.
EA focus has shifted towards AI and longtermism
Is there good discussion of that on here either? I have been tempted to put an hour aside to read longform articles and comment on them, but I rarely want to.
I think the problem is that discussion happens internally because it’s not that fun or alive to discuss technical stuff here. Note that that isn’t the case on LessWrong.
The thing it’s fun to discuss here is community drama. But I’m not sure that’s good for me, so I try to avoid it.
I dunno, I think that sounds galaxy-brained to me. I think that giving numbers is better than not giving them and that thinking carefully about the numbers is better than that. I don’t really buy your second order concerns (or think they could easily go in the opposite direction)
Yeah, I think you make good points. I think that forecasts are useful on balance, and then people should investigate them. Do you think that forecasting like this will hurt the information landscape on average?
Personally, to me, people engaged in this forecasting generally seem more capable of changing their minds. I think the AI2027 folks would probably be pretty capable of acknowledging they were wrong, which seems like a healthy thing. Probably more so than the media and academic?
Seems like a lot of specific, quite technical criticisms.
Sure, so we agree?
(Maybe you think I’m being derogatory, but no, I’m just allowing people who scroll down to the comments to see that I think this article contains a lot of specific, quite technical criticisms. If in doubt, I say things I think are true.)
Some thoughts:
I agree that the Forum’s speech norms are annoying. I would prefer that people weren’t banned for being impolite even white making useful points.
I agree in a larger sense that EA can be innervating, sapping one’s will for conflict with many small touches
I agree that having one main funder and wanting to please them seems unhelpful
I’ve always thought you are a person of courage and integrity
On the other hand:
I think if you are struggling to convince EAs that is some evidence. I too am in the “it’s very likely not the end of the world but still worth paying attention to” camp. You haven’t convinced me.
Your personal tweets have felt increasingly high conflict and less epistemically careful. I think I muted you over a year ago. I guess you hate this take, but it’s true.
I don’t expect this to change your mind, but maybe there are reasons you aren’t convincing very informed people besides us being blind to reality. I admit I’d enjoy being rich, but I’m not particularly convinced I’ll go try and work for a lab. And I don’t think I bend my opinions towards Coefficient, either, and have never been funded by them.
I think you’re right to sat that a large proportion of the public will come to agree with you. But also I expect a large proportion of the public to give talking points about water and energy use and that disney has a moral right to their characters for as long as copyright says they do. This doesn’t seem good to me. I sense it seems fine to you.
I don’t think this is all our war. I guess that you do. If so, we disagree. I will help to the extent I agree with you and be flatfooded and confused to the extent that I don’t. I get that that’s annoying. I feel some of that annoyance myself at ways I disagree with the community. But to me it feels part of being in a community. I have to convince people. And you have’t convinced me.
I feel this quite a lot:
The need to please OpenPhil etc
The sense of inness or outness based on cause area
The lack of comparing notes openly
That one can “just have friends”
And so I think Holly’s advice is worth reading, because it’s fine advice.
Personally I feel a bit differently. I have been hurt by EA, but I still think it’s a community of people who care about doing good per $. I don’t know how we get to a place that I think is more functional, but I still think it’s worth trying for the amout of people and resources attached to this space. But yes, I am less emotionally envolved than once I was.
Seems like a lot of specific, quite technical criticisms. I don’t edorse Thorstadts work in general (or not endorse it), but often when he cites things I find them valuable. This has enough material that it seems worth reading.
I think my main disagreement is here:“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so” … I think the rationalist mantra of “If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics” will turn out to hurt our information landscape much more than it helps.
I weakly disagree here. I am very much in the “make up statistics and be clear about that” camp. I disagree a bit with AI 2027 in that they don’t always label their forecasts with their median (which it turns out wasn’t 2027 ??).
I think that it is worth having and tracking individual predictions, though I acknowledge the risk that people are going to take them too seriously. That said, after some number of forecasters I think this info does become publishable (Katja Grace’s AI survey contains a lot of forecasts and is literally published).
My comments are on LessWrong (see link below) but I thought I’d give you lot a chance to comment also.
EA Yale Destiny Debate Discussion:
@Gavriel Kleinwaks (who works in this area) Gives her recommendation. When asked whether she “backed” them:
I do! (Not in the financial sense, tbc.) But just want to flag that my endorsement is confounded. Basically, Aerolamp uses the design of the nonprofit referenced in my post, OSLUV, and most of my technical info about far-UV comes from a) Aerolamp cofounder Viv Belenky and b) OSLUV. I’ve been working with Viv and OSLUV for a couple of years, long before the founding of Aerolamp, and trust their information, but you should know that my professional opinion is highly correlated with theirs—1Day Sooner doesn’t have the equipment to do independent testing.
I think it’s the ideal outcome that a bunch of excellent researchers took a look at the state of the field and made their own product. So I’m not too worried about relying on this team’s info, but you should just have that context.
Fwiw, Mox (moxsf.com), run by Austin Chen, has installed a couple of Aerolamps and they were easy to set up and are running smoothly.
This is a cool post, though I think it’s kind of annoying not to be able to see the specific numbers that one is putting them on without reading the chart.
@Gavriel Kleinwaks, do you back these?
Sure, and do you want to stand on any of those accusations? I am not going to argue the point with 2 blogposts. What is the point you think is the strongest?
As for Moskovitz, he can do as he wishes, but I think it was an error. I do think that ugly or difficult topics should be discussed and I don’t fear that. LessWrong, and Manifest, have cut okay lines through these topics in my view. But it’s probably too early to judge.
I often don’t respond to people who write far more than I do.
I may not respond to this.
Option B clearly provides no advantage to the poor people over Option A. On the other hand, it sure seems like Option A provides an advantage to the poor people over Option B.
This isn’t clear to me.
If the countries in question have been growing much slower than the S&P 500, then the money at the future point might be far more money to them than it is to them now. And they aren’t going to invest in the S&P 500 in the meantime.
I guess I can send you a mediocre prototype.
Sure, but I think there are also relatively accurate comments about the world.