Data scientist working on AI governance at MIRI, previously forecasting at Epoch and the Stanford AI Index. GWWC pledge member since 2017. Formerly social chair at Harvard Effective Altruism, facilitator for Arete Fellowship, and founder of the DC Slate Star Codex meetup.
Robi Rahmanšø
Karma: 1,526
What would you say in response to a conservative abortion clinic protestor who makes the same argument youāre making? āIt was ethically necessary for me to kidnap the doctor who was about to start their shift at Planned Parenthood. Yes, itās normally illegal to kidnap people, but those babies* were in imminent danger of being killed by the doctor, and itās permissible to break laws to avoid a forseeable imminent harm.ā (*The conservative protestor believes that fetuses have equal moral status to babies, the same way you and I believe that pigs have equal moral status to dogs.)
Is this offer still open? Iāll try it next weekend.
What happens with on-screen info? How are you ensuring that e.g. credit card numbers donāt get leaked if thereās a data breach?
It gets glitchy if you use two computers with DoneThat at overlapping times on the same day :(
Is it available for macOS?
Why do you think global health is no longer neglected?
Iāve just noticed that the OBBB Act contains a āno tax on overtimeā provision, exempting extra overtime pay up to a deduction of $12,500, for tax years 2025-2028. If you, like me, are indifferent between 40-hour workweeks and alternating 32- and 48-hour workweeks, you can get a pretty good extra tax deduction. This can be as easy as working one weekend day every 2 weeks and taking a 3-day weekend the following week. (Thatās an upper bound on the difficulty! Depending on your schedule and preferences there are probably even easier ways.) Unfortunately this only works for hourly, not salaried, employees.
Thank you very much, I hadnāt seen that the moral parliament calculator had implemented all of those.
Moral Marketplace strikes me as quite dubious in the context of allocating a single personās donations, though Iām not sure itās totally illogical.
Maximize Minimum is a nonsensically stupid choice here. A theory with 80% probability, another with 19%, and another with 0.000001% get equal consideration? I can force someone who believes in this to give all their donations to any arbitrary cause by making up an astronomically improbable theory that will be very dissatisfied if they donāt, e.g. āthe universe is ruled by a shrimp deity who will torture you and 10^^10 others for eternity unless you donate all your money to shrimp welfareā. You can be 99.9999...% sure this isnāt true but never 100% sure, so this gets a seat in your parliament.
Iām definitely not assuming the my-favorite-theory rule.
I agree that what Iām describing is favored by the maximize-expected-choiceworthiness approach, though I think you should reach the same conclusion even if you donāt use it.
Can you explain how a moral parliament would end up voting to split the donations? That seems impossible to me in the case where two conflicting views disagree on the best charityāI donāt see any moral trade the party with less credence/āvoting power can offer the larger party not to just override them. For parliaments with 3+ views but no outright majority, are you envisioning a spoiler view threatening to vote for the charity favored by the second-place view unless the plurality view allocates it some donation money in the final outcome?
edit: actually, I think the donations might end up split if you choose the allocation by randomly selecting a representative in the parliament and implementing their vote, in which case the dominant party would offer a little bit of donations in cases where it wins in exchange for donations in cases where someone else is selected?
Of course they might be uncertain of the moral status of animals and therefore uncertain whether donations to an animal welfare vs a human welfare charity is more effective. That is not at all a reason for an individual to split their donations between animal and human charities. You might want the portfolio of all EA donations to be diversified, but if an individual splits their donations in that way, they are reducing the impact of their donations relative to contributing only to one or the other.
Moral uncertainty is completely irrelevant at the level of individual donors.
Can you give examples of āadversarialā altruistic actions? Like protesting against ICE to help immigrants? Getting CEOs fired to improve what their corporations do?
By āgreater threat to AI safetyā you mean itās a bigger culprit in terms of amount of x-risk caused, right? As opposed to being a threat to AI safety itself, by e.g. trying to get safety researchers removed from the industry/āgovernment (like this).
What is positivism and what are some examples of non-positivist forms of knowledge?
IMO, merely 4x-ing the number of individual donors or the frequency of protests isnāt near the threshold for āmass social changeā in the animal welfare area.
āIndividual donors shouldnāt diversify their donationsā
Arguments in favor:
this is the strategy that maximizes the benefit to the recipients
Arguments against:
itās personally motivating to stay in touch with many causes
when each cause comes up in a conversation with non-EAs, you can mention youāve donated to it
Iām not a lawyer but this soundsā¦ questionably legal.
US tax rules for donaĀtions changĀing next year
Can I take you up on the offer to do a video call and see if we can install it on Chrome OS? Will DM you
Their scaling policies are not very good (or are ignored in favor of profits and increased scaling) so I donāt see how this is a win for forecasting. Unless youāre saying they would be even worse without FRI, which I donāt think is true (theyād probably behave the same regardless).