I comment on this paper here: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2022/07/cooks-critique-of-our-earliness-argument.html
RobinHanson
Karma: 92
You didn’t mention what I see as one of the biggest considerations: that current cryonics costs are dominated by fixed costs, because there are so few current customers. WIth a lot more customers the chance of success could also go way up.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/07/cryonics-as-charity.html
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/12/we-dont-have-to-die.html
You ’ll also need to add increasing good outcomes, along with decreasing bad outcomes.
I don’t have great confidence that the kinds of constraints that would be imposed on an age of em after a long reflection would actually improve that and further ages.
I see an unconstrained Age of Em as better than an eternal long reflection.
I have values, and The Age of Em overall contains a great deal that I value, and in fact probably more of what I value than does our world today.
It is a matter of the cost and coordination that would be required to reverse. If you allow these to be large enough, it isn’t clear than choices are ever irreversible, besides total extinction.
Political betting had a problem relative to perfection, not relative to the actual other alternatives used; it did better than them according to accuracy studies.
Yes there are overheads to using prediction markets, but those are mainly for having any system at all. Once you have a system, the overhead to adding a new question is much lower. Since you don’t have EA prediction markets now, you face those initial costs.
For forecasting in most organizations, hiring top 30 super forecasters would go badly, as they don’t know enough about that organization to be useful. Far better to have just a handful of participants from that organization.
Without some concrete estimate of how highly prediction markets are currently rated, its hard to say if they are over or under rated. They are almost never used, however, so it is hard to believe they are overused.
The office prediction markets you outline might well be useful. They aren’t obviously bad.
I see huge potential for creating larger markets to estimate altruism effectiveness. We don’t have any such at the moment, or even much effort to make them, so I find it hard to see that there’s too much effort there.
For example, it would be great to create markets estimating advertised outcomes from proposed World Bank projects. That might well pressure the Bank into adopting projects more likely to achieve those outcomes.
You seem to be comparing prediction markets to perfection, not to the real mechanisms that we now use today instead. People proposing prediction markets are suggesting they’d work better than the status quo. They are usually not comparing them to something like GJP.
“Hanson et al.’s basic model might be wrong in that expansionist alien civilizations could generally converge to be quiet, in the sense of not being clearly visible; or at least some fraction of expansionist civilizations could be quiet (both possibilities are excluded by Hanson et al.’s model).”
A large part of our main paper considers the ratio of quiet to loud aliens, and allows that ratio to be very large. Thus it is not at all true that that we ignore the possibility of many quiet civs. We also explicitly consider the possibility that we haven’t yet noticed large expansive civs, and we calculate the angle lengths of borders we might see in the sky in that case.