Thanks for agreeing to state your credences explicitly (and strongly upvoted for that reason).
I thought it was important to get more precision given the evidence showing that qualifiers such as ‘possible’, ‘likely’, etc are compatible with a wide range of values. Before your subsequent clarification, I interpreted your ‘quite plausible’ as expressing a probability of ~60%.
“Quite plausible”? What’s your actual credence?
it is not at all clear to me that the accusations that are being discussed here are separate from the accusations that appear to have caused his apology. I agree that if they were from separate disconnected communities, then that would be significant evidence
In his apology, Jacy says that he “know[s] very little of the details of these allegations.” But he clearly knows the Brown allegations very well. So even ignoring the other evidence cited by Halstead, the allegations for which he is apologizing clearly can’t include the Brown allegations.
EDIT: I now see it’s also possible that Jacy was presented with so little information that he wouldn’t be able to determine if the allegations CEA was concerned with included the Brown allegations, however well he knew the latter. My reasoning above ignores this possibility. Personally, I think the evidence Halstead offered is pretty conclusive, so I don’t think this makes a practical difference, but it still seemed something worth mentioning.
Thanks for doing this. Maybe add Andrew Yang? From a recent Vox article by Dylan Matthews:
Yang, a startup veteran and founder of the nonprofit Venture for America who has never run for elected office before, has made a $12,000-per-year basic income for all American adults the centerpiece of his campaign. He averages 0 to 1 percent in public opinion polls, but as of this writing, he’s surged on prediction markets, with bettors giving him slightly worse odds than Warren, Booker, and Klobuchar, and better odds than Tulsi Gabbard, Kirsten Gillibrand, or Julián Castro.
...successful or not, Yang is a fascinating cultural phenomenon. He blends a traditionally left-wing platform (a mass expansion of the safety net and a big new value-added tax, or VAT, to pay for it) with massive appeal to the young, predominantly male, and, in their unique way, socially conservative audiences of people like Joe Rogan and Sam Harris.
+1
To those interested in becoming better forecasters: I strongly recommend the list of prediction resources that Metaculus has put together.
If the topics to avoid are irrelevant to EA, it seems preferable to argue that these topics shouldn’t be discussed because they are irrelevant than to argue that they shouldn’t be discussed because they are offensive. In general, justifications for limiting discourse that appeal to epistemic considerations (such as bans on off-topic discussions) appear to generate less division and polarization than justifications that appeal to moral considerations.
That makes sense.
People who are down-voting, can you please explain why? To just down-vote seems unproductive.
Are you implying that every time someone downvotes a post they should provide an accompanying explanation of their decision? If not, what makes this post different from others?
In connection to (1), a while ago I compiled a list of EA-relevant fields and movements, with associated EA and academic references. As I point out in the document, the list is incomplete, but it’s already at a stage where others may perhaps find it useful. You can access the Google Doc here.
In case it helps others decide whether or not to take the Superforecasting Fundamentals course, I’m reposting a brief message I sent to the CEA Slack workspace back in August 2017:
I took it a year or so ago. The course is very good, but also very basic: I clearly wasn’t the target audience, since I was already quite familiar with most of the content. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you don’t know anything about forecasting.
I see. Thanks.
Another object-level point, due to AGB
Would you mind linking to the comment left by that user, rather than to the user who left the comment? Thanks.
This post compiles lists of important questions and problems.
Owen’s last name is ‘Cotton-Barratt’.
What would an EA policy platform look like?
You may want to expand your list to include some of the proposals here:
Paul Christiano, Policy porpourri
Jeff Kaufman, Policies
Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scientific American interview (search for ‘smart economists’)
Tyler Cowen, Policy implications of zero discounting
Glen Weyl & Eric Posner, Radical markets
Then I would suggest changing the title of the post. ‘Rationality as a cause area’ can mean many things besides ‘growing the rationality community’.
Furthermore, some of the considerations you list in support of the claim that rationality is a promising cause area do not clearly support, and may even undermine, the claim that one should grow the rationality community. Your remarks about epistemic standards, in particular, suggest that one should approach growth very carefully, and that one may want to deprioritize growth in favour of other forms of community building.
Feel free to ignore if you don’t think this is sufficiently important, but I don’t understand the contrast you draw between accuracy and outside world manipulation. I thought manipulation of prediction markets was concerning precisely because it reduces their accuracy. Assuming you accept Robin’s point that manipulation increases accuracy on balance, what’s your residual concern?
I find it questionable whether blatant attempts at voter manipulation through prediction markets are worth the cost. This is a big price to pay even if prediction markets did a bit better than polls or pundits.
Robin’s position is that manipulators can actually improve the accuracy of prediction markets, by increasing the rewards to informed trading. On this view, the possibility of market manipulation is not in itself a consideration that favors non-market alternatives, such as polls or pundits.
What are you talking about? There’s a clear difference between apologizing because one sincerely believes one acted wrongly, and apologizing only because one thinks the consequences will be graver if one fails to apologize. I am puzzled by your apparent failure to recognize this difference.