«If we are the only rational beings in the Universe, as some recent evidence suggests, it matters even more whether we shall have descendants or successors during the billions of years in which that would be possible. Some of our successors might live lives and create worlds that, though failing to justify past suffering, would have given us all, including those who suffered most, reasons to be glad that the Universe exists.» — Derek Parfit
Pablo_Stafforini
Karma: 2,700
I would add the extended episode of the 80,000 Hours podcast with David Chalmers. To my knowledge, some of the views he expresses there—e.g. that phenomenal consciousness is morally valuable even if not hedonically valenced—have not been explicitly discussed in either the EA or the philosophical literature.
Many utilitarian EAs have independently gravitated towards the view that the intrinsic value of pleasure and pain can be known by introspection or “direct acquaintance”. Surprisingly, as far as I know no statement of this view exists in the EA literature, though some may be found in the philosophical literature (including publications by philosophers sympathetic to EA):
Sharon Hewitt, The feeling of value: moral realism grounded in phenomenal consciousness
Neil Sinhababu The epistemic argument for hedonism
Adam Lerner, Fine-tuning evolutionary debunking arguments (unpublished)
Douglas Hubbard mentions a few rules of the sort you seem to be describing in his book How to measure anything. For example, his “Rule of Five” states that «There is a 93.75% chance that the median of a population is between the smallest and largest values in any random sample of five from that population.» One of the central themes in that book is in fact that you “have more data that you think”, and that these simple rules can take you surprisingly far.
I’m also not a native English speaker; to my ears, “unusual causes” feels similar in connotation to “non-standard causes”. What about simply “other causes”?
On cluelessness, I would add
Tomasik, Charity cost-effectiveness in an uncertain world
Christiano, We can probably influence the far future
On epistemic modesty:
Makes sense. I checked Gwern’s site and the previews are also triggered, confirming that this is a Vimium bug/feature.
Thank you for implementing these improvements! I’m particularly pleased to see that I can now add hyperlinks with a shortcut.
A request: not sure if it’s related, but around the time these changes were made, whenever I try to open an EA Forum link in a new tab using Vimium (keystroke: capital F), a preview of that page is shown and there’s no way I can turn it off without using the mouse. I think the preview should be shown only when one hovers over the relevant link (to inform the user whether the link is in fact worth visiting), whereas in this case it is shown after one selects the link to be opened, so it’s serving no useful function. It would be great if this could be fixed.
New newsletter: Effective Altruism Asia.
(H/T David Nash)
Thank you, that was informative. I don’t think you missed anything, though I haven’t myself thought about this question much—that is in part why I was curious to see someone else try to answer it.
I think genetic selection and/or editing has the potential to be transformative, and perhaps even to result in greater-than-human intelligence. Despite this, it’s comparatively neglected, both within EA and society at large. So having more explicit forecasts in this area seems pretty valuable.
I misread the post as asking for a personal forecast. Since I now realize it’s possible to ask questions of any type, I would much rather delegate a forecast on an important topic, such as:
How many standard deviations away from the mean will the 1000th human born from stem-cell derived gametes score in a test of cognitive ability taken at the age of 18?
How many points will I have on Metaculus at the end of 2021?
(Question resolves according to the number listed here on 2021-12-31 23:59:59 GMT.)
Note that it’s not just the Doomsday Argument that may give one reason for revising one’s x-risk estimates beyond what is suggested by object-level analyses of specific risks. See this post by Robin Hanson for an enumeration of the relevant types of arguments.
I am puzzled that these arguments do not seem to be influencing many of the most cited x-risk estimates (e.g. Toby’s). Is this because these arguments are thought to be clearly flawed? Or is it because people feel they just don’t know how to think about them, and so they simply ignore them? I would like to see more “reasoning transparency” about these issues.
It’s also worth noting that some of these “speculative” arguments would provide reason for revising not only overall x-risks estimates, but also estimates of specific risks. For example, as Katja Grace and Greg Lewis have noted, a misaligned intelligence explosion cannot be the Great Filter. Accordingly, insofar as the Great Filter influences one’s x-risk estimates, one should shift probability mass away from AI risk and toward risks that are plausible Great Filters.
I agree that the literature on the Doomsday Argument involves an implicit assessment of unknown risks, in the sense that any residual probability mass assigned to existential risk after deducting the known x-risks must fall under the unknown risks category. (Note that our object-level assessment of specific risks may cause us to update our prior general risk estimates derived from the Doomsday Argument.)
Still, Michael’s argument is not based on anthropic considerations, but on extrapolation from the rate of x-risk discovery. These are two very different reasons for revising our estimates of unknown x-risks, so it’s important to keep them separate. (I don’t think we disagree; I just thought this was worth highlighting.)
Not in your database, I think:
“Personally, I now think we humans will be wiped out this century,” Frank Tipler told me. He may be the most pessimistic of Bayesian doomsayers, followed by Willard Wells (who gives the same time frame for the end of civilization and the beginning of the postapocalypse).
William Poundstone, The Doomsday Calculation, p. 259
Unfortunately I haven’t read this book, and doubt I’ll get to it anytime soon, partly because I don’t think there’s an audiobook version.
FYI, you can turn virtually any text file into a machine-read audiobook with the Voice Aloud Reader app (Android, iOS). Not as nice as an audiobook read by a professional actor, but still pretty good, in my opinion (I use Google TTS Engine with ‘English (India)’ as the voice; I just like the Indian accent, and also get the impression that the speech synthesis is better than some of the other accents’).
Ambiguous statements are bad, 100%, but so are clear, baseless statements.
You seem to have switched from the claim that EAs often report their credences without articulating the evidence on which those credences rest, to the claim that EAs often lack evidence for the credences they report. The former claim is undoubtedly true, but it doesn’t necessarily describe a problematic phenomenon. (See Greg Lewis’s recent post; I’m not sure if you disagree.). The latter claim would be very worrying if true, but I don’t see reason to believe that it is. Sure, EAs sometimes lack good reasons for the views they espouse, but this is a general phenomenon unrelated to the practice of reporting credences explicitly.
You credit Anders Sandberg here and elsewhere, but you don’t provide a reference. Where did Sandberg propose the typology that inspired yours? A search for ‘direct information hazard’ (the expression you attribute to Sandberg) only results in this post and your LW comment.
This is how our species is going to die. Not necessarily from nuclear war specifically, but from ignoring existential risks that don’t appear imminent at this moment. If we keep doing that, eventually, something is going to kill us – something that looked improbable in advance, but that, by the time it looks imminent, is too late to stop.
Generally, I’d like to hear more about how different people introduce the ideas of EA, longtermism, and specific cause areas. There’s no clear cut canon, and effectively personalizing an intro can difficult, so I’d love to hear how others navigate it.
This seems like a promising topic for an EA Forum question. I would consider creating one and reposting your comment as an answer to it. A separate question is probably also a better place to collect answers than this thread, which is best reserved for questions addressed to Ben and for Ben’s answers to those questions.
Which of the EA-related views you hold are least popular within the EA community?
I agree this is useful and I often use it when forecasting. It’s important to emphasize that this is a useful prior, though, since Gott appears to treat it as an all-things-considered posterior.
William Poundstone uses this example, too, to illustrate the “Copernican principle” in his popular book on the doomsday argument.