Along with my co-founder, Marcus A. Davis, I run Rethink Priorities. I’m also a Grant Manager for the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund and a top forecaster on Metaculus. Previously, I was a professional data scientist.
Peter Wildeford
Karma: 10,760
Thanks for putting this together! I think more scrutiny on these ideas is incredibly important so I’m delighted to see you approach it.
So meta to red team a red team, but some things I want to comment on:
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Your median estimate for the conservative and aggressive bioanchor reports in your table are accidentally flipped (2090 is the conservative median, not the aggressive one—and vice versa for 2040).
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Looking literally at Cotra’s sheet the median year occurs is 2053. Though in Cotra’s report, you’re right that she rounds this to 2050 and reports this as her official median year. So I think the only differences between your interpretation and Holden’s interpretation is just different rounding.
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I do agree more precise definitions would be helpful.
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I don’t think it makes sense to deviate from Cotra’s best guess and create a mean out of aggregating between the conservative and aggressive estimates. We shouldn’t assume these estimates are symmetric where the mean lies in the middle using some aggregation method, instead I think we should take Cotra’s report literally where the mean of the distribution is where she says it is (it is her distribution to define how she wants), which would be the “best guess”. In particular, her aggressive vs. conservative range does not represent any sort of formal confidence interval so we can’t interpret it that way. I have some unpublished work where I re-run a version of Cotra’s model where the variables are defined by formal confidence intervals—I think that would be the next step for this analysis.
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The “Representativeness” section is very interesting and I’d love to see more timelines analyzed concretely and included in aggregations. For more reviews and analysis that include AI timelines, you should also look to “Reviews of “Is power-seeking AI an existential risk?””. I also liked this LessWrong thread where multiple people stated their timelines.
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I’m super excited for this! I love the in person conferences but I think virtual conferences also fill an important void for people who for a variety of reasons can’t easily travel to the US or UK.
If you have time, could you (or someone else) explain strategic ambiguity with regard to the US against China? I never really understood it because my understanding is that deterrence relies on clear communication and a lot of wars arise from miscalculations around how likely an adversary is to engage.
Sounds exciting!
I’m curious how that will work for people who aren’t self-employed teams of one?
I didn’t mention it but I do use that actually
Notes on “A World Without Email”, plus my practical implementation
Right now the thing we are most interested in is finding a strong candidate to work on the Insect Welfare Project full-time: https://careers.rethinkpriorities.org/en/jobs/50511
Donations would also be helpful. This kind of stuff can be harder to find financial support for than other things in EA. https://rethinkpriorities.org/donate
Will do!
More time periods
Better question wording
2.8x bigger sample size
However, polls suggest that the percentage of the population that’s vegetarian has stayed basically flat since 1999
I think there’s three nitpicks I’d make here:
1.) The sample size of this poll you cite (margin of error of +/- 4%) is typically not large enough to detect subtle shifts in the percentage of vegetarians, especially since the initial population is so small, such that the veg rate could approximately double and still have a ~50% chance of not being detected by the poll.
2.) As you may know, asking people whether they are vegetarian/vegan in a poll is a fairly fraught concept, since we know that people frequently say “Yes” to this question while also saying “Yes” to eating meat.
3.) I think looking at a better collection of polls actually does find a positive upward trend, going from ~2.5% in 1999 to ~6% in 2022. These polls also solve (2) by better question wording.
None of this should be taken to undermine your point though—I do think veg retention is a large issue and more marginal work on it would be helpful.
the “*” is meant to be a glob/wildcard rather than a censor
Speaking for Rethink Priorities, I’d just like to add that benchmarking to market rates is just one part of how we set compensation, and benchmarking to academia is just one part of how we might benchmark to market rates.
In general, academic salaries are notoriously low and I think this is harmful for building long-term relationships with talent that let them afford a life that we want them to be able to live. Also we want to be able to attract the top-tier of research assistant and a higher salary helps with that.
I found a few bugs:
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The link to Cash Callaghan’s, Adeline Sinclair’s, and Harshdeep Singh’s bios on https://www.openphilanthropy.org/team/ doesn’t work
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Under “What can I do now to prepare for a role at Open Phil later?” on https://www.openphilanthropy.org/careers/ there is a bullet point that is just ”.”
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There’s an inexplicable black box on https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/team/javier-prieto/
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I’ve wondered this a lot myself and find this lack of clarity to always be an issue. I personally think something in the realm of 9 makes the most sense, and I personally define “$X of value” as “as good as shifting $X from a morally neutral use to being donated to GiveDirectly”. It helps that I roughly expect GiveDirectly to have linear returns, even in the range of billions spent. But I do try to make this explicit in a footnote or something when I discuss value.
Another good idea in the realm of 9 is how GiveDirectly defines their ROI:
We measure philanthropic impact in units of the welfare gained by giving a dollar to someone with an annual income of $50,000, which was roughly US GDP per capita when we adopted this framework.
The original results are hosted on a site that no longer works, so the results have been moved here: https://rethinkpriorities.org/s/EASurvey2015.pdf
The previous link to the survey results died, so I edited to update the link.
Human survival is a policy choice
The chance of accidental nuclear war has been going down
I hope someday you organize a convention and call it EAEconCon
Thanks! We’re very excited to be both an accelerant and a partner for Epoch’s work