NegativeNuno

Karma: 454

This is a novelty account created by Nuño Sempere for the purpose of providing perhaps-flawed frank criticism.

The problems it’s intended to mitigate are that when providing criticism:

providing criticism which is on-point and yet emotionally thoughtful is doubly hard,
leaving negative criticism can sometimes give the impression that I think a project is not worth it, whereas I think that providing criticism is most valuable for projects which are in fact worth it
conversely, it’s sometimes hard to communicate in a polite manner that a project is ~essentially worthless, and that the author should probably be doing something else. E.g., “your theory of impact sucks”. But someone has to do it
mechanisms to signal good intent can become trite and fake to read and to produce, like shit sandwiches, or the phrase “fairly good.”
mechanisms to signal good intent can vary from culture to culture, and result in miscommunication.
the above points become trickier in the presence of uncertainty about whether the criticism is on-point or stemming from confusion.

And yet, criticism seems worth it expectation, particularl if that it can change the actions of its recipients, or of its readers. For this reason, I thought it would be worth it to try to signal potentially flawed and upsetting criticism as such, and maybe develop a set of standard disclaimers around it.

Past examples using the set of patterns which I intend to use this account to manifest include: this comment or the examples in post

An example interaction with individuals might look like:

NN: Hey, do you want to hear some negative feedback under Crocker’s rules?
A: No, thanks.

or like:

NN: Hey, do you want to hear some negative feedback under Crocker’s rules?
A: Sure, why not.
NN: [negative feedback]

or like:

Someone else: “Hey, you should fund X!”
NN: Funding X sounds like a terrible idea.

I currently consider organizations, particularly large ones, to be fair game.

I am open to negative feedback requests, either here or through my main account.

NegativeNuno 21 Jan 2023 19:40 UTC
3 points
6 ∶ 0
in reply to: joshuab’s comment on: AGI and the EMH: markets are not expecting aligned or unaligned AI in the next 30 years
Cheers, I thought this comment was very informative

NegativeNuno 19 Jan 2023 10:41 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: The EA community does not own its donors’ money
Yes, thanks

NegativeNuno 19 Jan 2023 1:10 UTC
162 points
31 ∶ 8
in reply to: Dustin Moskovitz’s comment on: The EA community does not own its donors’ money
It is 2AM in my timezone, and come morning I may regret writing this. By way of introduction, let me say that I dispositionally skew towards the negative, and yet I do think that OP is amongst the best if not the best foundation in its weight class. So this comment generally doesn’t compare OP against the rest but against the ideal.
One way which you could allow for somewhat democratic participation is through futarchy, i.e., using prediction markets for decision-making. This isn’t vulnerable to brigading because it requires putting proportionally more money in the more influence you want to have, but at the same time this makes it less democratic.
More realistically, some proposals in that broad direction which I think could actually be implementable could be:
- allowing people to bet against particular OpenPhilanthropy grants producing successful outcomes.
- allowing people to bet against OP’s strategic decisions (e.g., against worldview diversification)
- I’d love to see bets between OP and other organizations about whose funding is more effective, e.g., I’d love to see a bet between your and Jaan Tallinn on who’s approach is better, where the winner gets some large amount (e.g., $200M) towards their philanthropic approach
I’m particularly attracted to bets which have the shape of “you will change your mind about this in the future”.
At various points in the past, I think I would have personally appreciated having the option to bet...
- against hypothetically continued funding towards Just Impact beating GiveDirectly
- against your $8M towards INFER having been efficiently spent
- that the marginal $5M given out as grants in an ACX grants-type process would be better than your marginal $5M to forecasting (you are giving more than $5M/yeear to forecasting, cf. your $8M grant to INFER).
- against worldview diversification being evaluated positively by a neutral third party.
- for closer or later AI timelines.
- on more abstract topics, e.g., “your forecasting grantmaking is understaffed/underrated”, or “your forecasting grantmaking is too institutional”, “OP finds it too hard to exercise trust and would obtain better results by having more grant officers”.
- at the odds implied by some of your public forecasts.
Note that individual people inside OP may agree with some of the above propositions, even though “OP as a whole” may act as if they believe the opposite.
I have not myself come up with a non-geographic strategy that doesn’t seem highly vulnerable to corrupt intent or vote brigading.
You could also delegate the research of a strategy for democratic participation to other researchers, rather than doing it yourself, e.g., Robin Hanson’s time is probably buy-able with money. It would really surprise me if he (or other researchers) wasn’t able to come up with a few futarchy-adjacent ideas that were at least worth considering.
More broadly, I think that there is a spectrum between:
- OpenPhilanthropy makes all decisions democratically and we all sing Kumbaya
- Influencing OP decisions requires people to move to the Bay area and become chummy friends with its grants officers. Karnofsky writes tens of thousands of words in blogposts but does not answer comments. At the same time OP ultimately makes decisions which steer the EA community and reverberate across many lives.
Both extremes are caricatures, but we are closer to the second. Contrast with the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which has a number of regrantors with pots which grow proportionally to their estimated success.
I also think that comparison with FTX’s FF is instructive, because it was willing to trust a larger number of regrantors much earlier, and I think was able to produce a number of more experimental, ambitious and innovative grants as a result. For what it’s worth, my impression here is that Beckstead and MacAskill & the others in the FFF team did a great job here which was pretty much independent of FTX’s fraud.
So anyways, I’ve brought up some mechanisms here:
- Allowing people to bet against the success of your grants
- Allowing people to bet against the success of your strategic decisions
- Allowing people to bet that they are better at giving out grants than OP is
  - Or generally trying out systems other than grants officers.
- Using a wide number of regrantors rather than a small number of grant officers.
which perhaps get some the same benefits that democratization could produce for decision-making, namely information aggregation from a wider pool, and distribution of trust.
My sense is that OP could take these and other steps, and they could have some value of information, while perhaps not being all that risky if tried out at a small scale. It’s unclear though whether the managerial effort would be worth it.
PS: I liked the idea behind the Cause Exploration prizes, though I think that they did fail to produce a mechanism for addressing the above points, since the cause proposals were limited to Global Health & Wellbeing, and the worldview questions were too specific, whereas I think that the most important decisions are at the strategic level.

NegativeNuno 3 Aug 2022 13:23 UTC
15 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: DukeGartzea’s comment on: New cause area: Violence against women and girls
I notice that this comment was pretty controversial (16 people voted, karma of 3). Here is how I would rewrite this comment to better fit in the EA forum:

Yes, this is true that men are more likely to be victims of non-sexual violence. However, note that most men are killed by other men, whereas a large number of the women who are killed (50% according to the UN) are killed by their partners or family. (1) (2). So “while men are more likely than women to be victims of homicide, they are even more likely to be the perpetrators.”

I think that recognizing gender disparities is important for understanding what kind of violence occurs, and that that this is key to ending it because [and here goes a few specific pathways]. For example, if we look at the power dynamics between aggressors and victims, we can [do some example specific thing differently.] ^[1]

I think that for me the thing that was most missing is a pathway between noticing gender disparities and taking a different action, rather than caring about it in the abstract. I haven’t really looked, but this might also be what’s going on in some of your other unpopular comments.
1. ↩︎
  For a toy example of something you might say: “If we look at the power dynamics between aggressors and victims, we might notice that a specific cluster of violence is husbands beating up or murdering their wifes, and we can do things like putting up billboards encouraging women to leave their abusive husbands. This seems like it would have a different cost-effectiveness profile than other kinds of murders, and I personally think (but can’t prove/and here is a study that suggests that this is the case) that it might be pretty cost-effective.”

NegativeNuno 25 Jul 2022 1:15 UTC
13 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: NegativeNuno’s comment on: If you fail, you will still be loved and can be happy; a love letter to all EAs
Here is a model that I want to share with you:

It’s worded in terms of starting projects and receiving funding because that’s been on mind, but you could translate it to other domains. There should also be a third dimension which is “well, but how good are you, really”.

I claim that knowing where you are on that grid is important, because it will lead you to better actions (in the case of “correctly depressed”, it might be “attain mastery of a skill” so that you move one level up, or “being ok with being humble” ^[1]).

I don’t know what you are claiming with regards to that grid.
1. ↩︎
  E.g., supppose that “project” in this grid is “starting your own organization”. In many respects you’ll want to be “correctly depressed” w/r to that. Maybe not the best name.

NegativeNuno 25 Jul 2022 0:48 UTC
0 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: howdoyousay?’s comment on: If you fail, you will still be loved and can be happy; a love letter to all EAs
The more I reread your post, the more I feel our differences might be more nuances, but I think your contrarian / playing to an audience of cynics tone (which did amuse me) makes them seem starker?

I think that I disagree with you with regards to how people value other people, and how people should expect other people to value them, and less about where one should derive one’s own self-worth from ^[1]. As such, I do think that we have a disagreement.

I am not sure whether you’re saying “treating people better / worse depending on their success is good”; particularly in the paragraphs about success and worth. Or that you think that’s just an immutable fact of life (which I disagree with). What’s your take?

I think it is good in the case of, for instance, your professional life. For instance, funders are likely to fund projects differentially for people who have previous successes under their belt. People might fire other people if they haven’t been going well at their jobs.

In the case of personal life, it’s more ambiguous. As we both agree on, it causes sorrow. However, I think it’s hard to change, because there are traits that make someone a good friend, romantic partner, colleague, and I think that it’s a bit futile to go against that. I don’t think it’s literally impossible, but I think that there are time tradeoffs, and developing existential chill is one of many things one could do with one’s time.

I’ve also had bad experiences with situations which gave the outer impression of being high trust/high acceptance, but weren’t in the end when that acceptance was pushed a bit.

I think that sometimes you can get away with a “judge once” regime, where once you are in someone’s circle of care they care about you unconditionally, but I also think that people have limited spots.

How do you see “having given my honest best shot”as distinct from my point of the value in trying your hardest? I’m suspicious we’d find them most the same thing if we looked into it...

I’m not sure what your point of trying your hardest is, maybe:

I can donate effectively as much as I can, and work as hard as I can on what I think matters, but ultimately the odds are stacked against me, like they are for everyone

I think a difference might be that I derive some self-worth from staying true to my ideals, or “staying true to inner self”, but I read you as saying that you derive self-worth from some intrinsic value. I read that paragraph as saying that “you can work as hard as you can”, but not making a statement related to that as self-worth.

It’s possible I’m missing what the point was.

I think that we have different things:
- How you value yourself
- How other people value you
- How you value other people
your other points/questions are more about how you value yourself (“self-worth”?), but I am mostly talking about how other people value you (“external worth”?), and neither agree nor disagree on the points about self-worth.

Muddying the above do think that how other people perceive one is usually a pretty important part of people’s self-worth, and while I think this might be changeable with effort, I’m not sure to what extent that is a good use of one’s time.

Maybe I should have written

I’ve found more value in deriving worth (part of my internal self-worth) from “having given my honest best shot” and taking actions that will make me more formidable, like mastery over skills (which increases both self-worth and external worth).

I don’t think that mastery over skills is incompatible with notions of internal self-worth.

I’m confident that feeling like their worth doesn’t depend on sucessful mastery of skills is itself a pretty good foundation for mastery of skills.

I would disagree over external self-worth. I think that people with more mastery over more skills are more valuable to those around them.
I don’t mind if people think I’m better / worse at something and ‘measure me’ in that way; I don’t mind if it presents fewer opportunities. But I take issue when anyone...:
- uses that measurement to update on someone’s value as a person, and treat them differently because of it, or;
- over-updates on someone’s ability; the worst of which looks like deference or writing someone off.
The “I don’t mind if it presents fewer opportunities” vs “[I do mind if they] treat them differently because of it” seem incompatible.

Here is a scenario: We have a few conversations. These conversations aren’t enough for me to be very sure, but I come away with the impression that you are a boring conversationalist. In the future, I tend to seek other conversations. Is this something you’d object to?

What if you change (“conversations, “boring conversationalist”) to (“dancing sessions”, “clumsy dancer”), (“trial tasks”, “unproductive contractor”), (“date”, probably not a potential relationship”), (“chess matches”, “vastly superior/inferior chess player”). I’m unsure what you would say here, or why.

writing someone off.

I actually really do to this, I think that writing off people quickly is necessary in contexts like dates, job opportunities with many potential applicants, bloggers to read, etc. It’s possible you have some more nuanced meaning here, though.
1. ↩︎
  I reserve my right to take issue with that at some future point. Also, I liked the ” I grace you with more sappy reasons why you’re wrong, and sign you up to my life-coaching platform” sentence.

NegativeNuno 24 Jul 2022 16:48 UTC
17 points
0 ∶ 0
on: If you fail, you will still be loved and can be happy; a love letter to all EAs
Content warning: If you stare too much into the void, the void stares back at you.

So the title of my blog is Measure is unceasing partly as a reminder to myself that some of the ideas which are presented in this blogpost are dead wrong. In short, I think that people are judging each other all the time. In the past, pretending or wanting to believe that this isn’t the case has provided me with temporary relief but ultimately led to a path of sorrow.

I particularly take issue with:

But you’ll still suffer a lot if you think that the worth others ascribe to you is pegged to your success

The problem with that form of reasoning is that the worth others ascribe to you is in fact pegged to your success. Other people will hold you in higher regard and esteem if you are in fact successful. You will get more grants, jobs or career opportunities, your ability to intervene in the world will be greater, and, perhaps most importantly for your wellbeing, you will attain more romantic success.

To be clear, I agree with your diagnosis that taking this fact to be true is emotionally hard. But I disagree that pretending that it isn’t the case is a good solution. I’ve personally found value in learning to accept it instead and taking action to make reality come closer to what I desire it to be.

Or, in other words, I agree that having psychological safety is good. But I think this is the case for true psychological safety, which could come from a circle of close friends or family who are in fact willing to support you in hard times. So psychological safety > no psychological safety >> a veneer of psychological safety that fails when it is tested.

they are worthy as they are

So I think you can defend versions of this, but you end up with a notion of “worth” that is pretty essentialist and isn’t really correlated with many of the stuff you care about (career success, influence over the world, romantic success, etc.). As such, I haven’t found it valuable. I’ve found more value in deriving worth from “having given my honest best shot” and taking actions that will make me more formidable, like mastery over skills.

cosmic insignificance

I don’t find the yardstick of the universe useful, but I like humans v. nature framing.

NegativeNuno 10 May 2022 3:14 UTC
16 points
0 ∶ 0
on: NegativeNuno’s Shortform
I recently read a post which:
- I thought was treating the reader like an idiot
- I thought was below-par in terms of addressing the considerations of the topic it broached
- I would nonetheless expect to be influential, because [censored]
Normally, I would just ask if they wanted to get a comment from this account. Or just downvote it and explain my reasons for doing so. Or just tear it apart. But today, I am low on energy, and I can’t help but feel: What’s the point? Sure, if I was more tactful, more charismatic, and glibber, I might both be able to explain the mistakes I see, and provide social cover both for myself and for the author I’m critizicing. But I’m not, not today. And besides, if the author was such that they produced a pretty sloppy piece, I don’t think I’m going to change their mind.

NegativeNuno 30 Apr 2022 13:27 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Eric Neyman’s comment on: My bargain with the EA machine

which of the categories are you putting me in?

I don’t think this is an important question, it’s not like “tall people” and “short people” are a distinct cluster. There is going to be a spectrum, and you would be somewhere in the middle. But still using labels is a convenient shorthand.

So the thing that worries me is that if someone is optimizing for something different, they might reward other people for doing the same thing. The case has been on my mind recently where someone is a respected member of the community, but what they are doing is not optimal, and it would be awkward to point that out. But still necessary, even if it looses one brownie points socially.

Overall, I don’t really read minds, and I don’t know what you would or wouldn’t do.

NegativeNuno 30 Apr 2022 13:11 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Eric Neyman’s comment on: My bargain with the EA machine

EA should accept/reward people in proportion to (or rather, in a monotone increasing fashion of) how much good they do.

I think this would work if one actually did it, but not if impact is distributed with long tails (e.g., power law) and people take offense to being accepted very little.

NegativeNuno 30 Apr 2022 13:08 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MMMaas’s comment on: A primer & some reflections on recent CSER work (EAB talk)
Thanks ‪Matthijs

NegativeNuno 28 Apr 2022 16:57 UTC
16 points
0 ∶ 0
on: My bargain with the EA machine
One “classic internet essay” analyzing this phenomenon is Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution. A phrase commonly used in EA would be “keep EA weird”. The point is that adding too many people like Eric would dillute EA, and make the social incentive gradients point to places we don’t want them to point to.

I really enjoy socializing and working with other EAs, more so than with any other community I’ve found. The career outcomes that are all the way up (and pretty far to the right) are ones where I do cool work at a longtermist office space, hanging out with the awesome people there during lunch and after work

My understanding is that this is a common desire. I’m not sure what proportion of harcore EAs vs chill people would be optimal, and I could imagine it being 100% hardcore EAs.
What links here?
- EA Forum Lowdown: April 2022 by NunoSempere (1 May 2022 14:48 UTC; 154 points)

NegativeNuno 28 Apr 2022 14:33 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: NegativeNuno’s comment on: Update on the Simon Institute: Year One
Circling back to this, this report hits almost none of the notes in lukeprog’s Features that make a report especially helpful to me, which might be one reason why I got the impression that the authors were speaking a different dialect.

NegativeNuno 28 Apr 2022 14:29 UTC
10 points
0 ∶ 0
on: A primer & some reflections on recent CSER work (EAB talk)
I get the impression that some parts of CSER are fairly valuable, whereas others are essentially dead weight. E.g., if I imagine ranking in pairs all the work referenced in your presentation, my impression is that value would range 2+ orders of magnitude between the most valuable and the least valuable.

Is that also your impression? Even if not, how possible is it to fund some parts of CSER, but not others?

NegativeNuno 21 Apr 2022 16:59 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: NegativeNuno’s comment on: Update on the Simon Institute: Year One
Specific nitpicks

These were written as I was reading the post, so some of them are addressed by points brought up later. They are also a bit too sardonic.
- “For all key risks, humanity’s path to existential security cannot be brought about by the actions of any single country, making more effective international cooperation essential”
  - Is this actually true? Not sure. For instance, if the US, China and maybe the UK decide to not do anything too crazy like getting into an AI arms race, that seems like it might leave us in a decent position, AI policy-wise.
- “This combination of activities has granted SI mandates from UN institutions, as well as the Swiss government, to directly work on policy processes relevant to existential risk reduction”
  - Mandates but no money? “Mandates” sounds good, but not sure what it means.
  - [note: my initial impression was wrong, for instance, later you say] “We have signed a grant agreement of CHF 50,000 from the Swiss Government’s International Public Law Division for a project on existential risk governance led by SI’s board member Igor Linkov. Our collaboration with the Geneva Science-Policy Interface has yielded another grant agreement of CHF 30,000 for work on the tabletop exercise on pandemic preparedness.”. Nice. But is this the same “mandate”.
- “Science-policy interface” is a really neat construction, but I wouldn’t call Global Priorities research a “science”
- “This is why SI could fill a gap in an information-rich but time-scarce environment”. More plainly expressed sentences could also fill a gap in verbiage-rich but transparency-scare environments. Ok, this is mean. But, for instance, I think I could get a better idea of what you are doing if you word this as: “We try to build relationships with and make recommendations to really busy bureacrats who are nonetheless a bit altruistically inclined. Eventually, we could position ourselves so as to build international institutions for existential risk reduction, like a new treaty or the International Atomic Energy Agency”. But is that what you are doing? I sort of get the vague feeling that I don’t know how you are spending most of your hours.
- “SI is embedded in one of the few international policy hubs—Geneva—and adapts its strategy in response to arising opportunities”. The word “embedded” rubs me the wrong way.
- “2021 has marked a breakthrough in international policymakers’ responsiveness to longtermist concerns.” ⇒ Policymakers are now more worried about weird and unexpected things because COVID provides a salient example.
- “Leveraging this window of opportunity, SI works with them to reduce existential risks and further long-term governance via the impact pathways of the international system.”. I am really not sure what proportion of impact of this leveraging SI is claiming, or what proportion should be allocated to it.
- “Began to work on the UN’s Our Common Agenda processes”. Directly??? In what capacity?
- “co-develop a workshop series”: Would the series have happened in your absence? What % of the value was due to your participation?
- “Some international organizations, like the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) and the International Science Council, also explicitly stated an interest in developing a better understanding of GCRs as a result”. My first thought on reading this is “nice!”. But “stated an interest in developing a better understanding” is actually extremely non-committal. What do you think it will/could cash out to?
- “Without SI, FHI Bio would have been less likely to get an in-depth look behind the scenes of international diplomacy and unlikely to connect to key stakeholders in a setting where personal discussion allowed for the divulging of insider information and personal opinion”. How much less likely?
- “Beyond taking a significant amount of time out of their busy days, many diplomats would also have needed security clearance to participate.”. Why the security clearance?

NegativeNuno 21 Apr 2022 16:58 UTC
27 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: konrad’s comment on: Update on the Simon Institute: Year One
Epistemic status: not too sure. See account description.

Overall thoughts
- The first few sections of this post came across to me as a bit “fake-ish”, and really put me off as a reader. Some sardonic notes on that below.
- Depending on the details, the work on the UN’s “Our Common Agenda” (OCA) and your work with the Swiss government seems fairly to very exciting! I’d be curious to get a few more details on it
What parts I’m most excited about, and how I would have structured this post
1. Sections 2.5. We can engage and provide value to both our research and policy audiences, and 2.7. Our current research capacity is limited but our thinking valued are fairly strong. On 2.7., you could also commission or suggest the kinds of research you are most excited about, even if you don’t have the ability to do them yourself.
2. I also thought that these paragraphs were very strong:
Building on these reference points, the UN’s Our Common Agenda presents a rare opportunity to directly work on future generations and existential risks in national and international political agendas. This is because they are explicitly introduced in the report and 17 out of its 69 proposals are directly relevant to longtermist goals

Our biggest upcoming opportunity is that we have been solicited by the UN SG Office to contribute to the development of Our Common Agenda. We evaluate it to be a unique opportunity for impact as it has introduced the concepts of existential risk and intergenerational global public goods to the international policy discourse, as well as put a strong focus on future generations in a way that is separate from youth engagement.
1. The fact that your funding appeal is directly connected to your work on the UN’s “Our common agenda” specifically makes it stronger.
I would have put them at the beginning, rather than somewhere in the post. I would have also been more explicit at the beginning, rather than talking about a “mandate” in the abstract. What exactly does the mandate involve?

I would also have liked to see more emphasis on your work as experimentation. This writeup strikes me as the kind of writeup that a more mature organization might produce. But your organization is much younger and has just one to three FTEs, so I would have liked to see an emphasis on your capacity for experimentation, ability to pivot, and general competence.

Key points

Some key points I would look at if I had unlimited time:
- Does the UN actually matter? I come away with the impression that you believe that this is the case. But my prior on the UN being decidedly mediocre and not that relevant is actually quite strong, and it is actually not clear to me how much I should defer to your expert understanding.
  - For instance, weapon reduction treaties such as New START were not conceived as part of a UN framework. Similarly, the fact that the Biological Weapons Convention has so low a budget makes me update very negatively on the UN’s competence.
  - One factor contributing to this is the US’ recluctance to take part in UN’s structures, rather than doing its own thing.
- Because you have mostly been doing collaborations, I am really unsure about the Simon Institute’s (SI) Shapley and counterfactual value.
Overall, these seem hard to resolve. But this grant seems like it still makes a lot of sense from a hits-based perspective.

Thoughts on fundraising

Our main fundraising targeted the EA Funds, resulting in six proposals for a total of ca. $ 600,000. Of these proposals, only $ 46,000 was granted. Another application to the Survival and Flourishing Fund for network-building activities was rejected without comment. Founders Pledge investigated our plans and concluded SI to be promising but with an insufficient track record for a recommendation.

The main reason for worry seems to have been our limited track record in downside-risk-conscious policy engagement, given SI’s ambitious, public-facing plans. Thus, the EA Infrastructure Fund decided to fund a minimal version of SI to first gather more data for a more telling evaluation after March 2022.

So my understanding here is that EA Funds didn’t really trust your judgment, and wanted to see a track record before funding you further. I’m not sure to what extent this post achieves that goal with regards to the good judgment part.

Furthermore, as SI works at the interface between existential risk research and related policymaking, we have to frame our work differently to various sides and communicate these choices transparently to all sides. Some framings appear insufficiently technical to existential risk researchers while others appear too theoretical to our policy audiences. We are planning to conduct message testing studies to improve cross-context coherence, beyond local salience.

Yeah, this is tricky. For instance, I’m not sure to what extent you are thinking clearly but expressing your thoughts a bit too verbosely or in essentially a different dialect, or directly thinking unclearly.

Parting thoughts

I’ve put some specific nitpicks in a separate comment below. Surprisingly, many of these nitpicks mostly relate to the way you word things, rather than to your actual content. But I think that the way you word things formally also has you leave out a fair amount of detail.

Particularly around the UN’s “Our Common Agenda”. I can imagine situations that would make it worth it for you to be fully funded, but also situations where it’s not all that exciting. A year ago I spent some time trying to figure out how the Sustainable Development Goals were decided, and I really couldn’t exactly tell. I also couldn’t tell by how much the SDGs ended up affecting, for instance, US aid funding. I think you probably have a bunch of implicit models around how this could be valuable, but this post would have been a good time to write them up.

In an ideal world, you could also have an estimate of how much better $4M to you would make the OCA, and how much funding/resources the OCA would influence, to get a reasonable estimate on impact. For instance, here is a guesstimate model that assumes that the only pathway to funding is Simon Institute → OCA → SDG → Foreign aid. I’m guessing that this is wrong, but I also don’t have a good sense of by what the impact of OCA is mediated through. So I’d be curious to get a less fake estimate using your own models.

Overall, I’m left hoping that EA would have its own Kissinger to be able to evaluate whether this kind of thing is really promising.

NegativeNuno 18 Apr 2022 14:06 UTC
−2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: FTX/CEA—show us your numbers!
Downvoted because of the clickbait title and the terrible formatting

NegativeNuno 8 Apr 2022 19:19 UTC
21 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Update on the Simon Institute: Year One
Do you want an overly negative and perhaps inaccurate comment from this account, under Crocker’s rules?

NegativeNuno 25 Mar 2022 12:59 UTC
51 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Pre-announcing a contest for critiques and red teaming
Heartwarming

NegativeNuno 21 Mar 2022 19:43 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: What we tried (Covid response AMA)
Hey, do you want a comment from this account (see description) on this post?

NegativeNuno

Specific nitpicks

Overall thoughts

What parts I’m most excited about, and how I would have structured this post

Key points

Thoughts on fundraising

Parting thoughts