I’m the Forecasting Program Coordinator at Metaculus. Formerly a bridge engineer and I’ve also written some sci-fi.
https://www.ryanbeckauthor.com/
https://twitter.com/BeckRyooan
I’m the Forecasting Program Coordinator at Metaculus. Formerly a bridge engineer and I’ve also written some sci-fi.
https://www.ryanbeckauthor.com/
https://twitter.com/BeckRyooan
My two cents on a couple of these from the perspective of a father of two girls (4 years old and 2 years old, I’m 30). Just my perspective, feel free to disregard if not helpful!
On emotions and discipline, I’m also a very calm person and rarely show anger and frustration. But kids are really good at finding was to frustrate you. I almost never yell at them, but I do get frustrated or exasperated and raise my voice, and it’s genuinely unclear to me how anyone could parent a child without doing that.
In general I think the military wisdom “no plan survives first contact with the enemy” is a good rule of thumb for parenting, except substitute “the enemy” with “these small lunatics I never imagined I could love so much.” My wife and I had bold plans for how we would parent, how we would minimize screen time, how our children would eat healthy foods all the time, and so on. But a lot of that goes out the window when you’re tired and have chores to do and the kids won’t give you an inch of personal space or you need to make a quick dinner or one kid is potty training and needs near constant attention but your other kid is bored and also wants attention or whatever. We also know other parents who had big plans about how they would parent, and in the end made many compromises.
All that is to say that I think it’s good that you’re thinking about how you want to parent. Maybe you’ll have more luck than I did sticking to your original plans. And maybe it’s good to start with ambitious initial plans, that way if you deviate from them you’re still mostly on track, I’m not sure. But I would just advise that I think a key part of parenting is flexibility and prioritizing which values you care about. If you let your three year old watch a TV show a few times a week so you can have some time to get the dishes done or get dinner made, how harmful is that really? If that helps you de-stress a little and leads to less exasperation it may be beneficial on net. Kids differ a lot in personalities and attitudes (it was surprising to me how different my kids can be), so the compromises you need to make may vary depending on what your kid is like, and I think it can help to be mindful of that going in.
On developing curiosity and wonder I think just sharing fascinating things with your kids whenever possible seems to work well. Sometimes I share something and I can tell my four year old isn’t really interested or maybe doesn’t understand, and that’s fine. But other times I’ll show her something cool I can tell she’s echoing my excitement and interest in it and asking surprisingly thoughtful questions. I think the big thing is just sharing your excitement about it and trying to include your kid in it. In general making time to share your interests seems to work well, recently I’ve been watching football with my oldest and explaining the rules and how it works, and even though I don’t think she fully understands it she seems to be really enjoying it and picking up a lot of stuff, and I think that’s mainly just because she knows I’m trying to include her in it. The same thing happens when I show her pictures from the James Webb space telescope or show her videos of rocket launches or SpaceX landing their boosters or whatever and make the time to explain why I think it’s so awesome.
Thanks for writing this, as a new-ish user of the forum it’s been frustrating trying to find previous posts that address questions I have or things I want to learn more about, only to find sprawling or multi-part posts with half hour or longer read-times that may or may not address the specific thing I’m interested in.
Also you mentioned jargon and I think there’s room for a lot of improvement there, it seems to me like there’s more jargon than is justified and it made the forum daunting for me. This previous post has some good recommendations and in my opinion it would be valuable for more people to try to simplify their language where possible.
I’ve found this short article useful in explaining the case for it. Basically it says that a guarantee of defense could embolden Taiwan to more aggressively pursue independence which could provoke China, while committing to not interfere could embolden China to invade. The US benefits from better relations with both countries if it walks a line between them and it may be better for peace between them if Taiwan has to tread carefully and China expects a high chance of the US fighting off an invasion of Taiwan.
Thanks for posting this, I’m glad to see more discussion of the issue and you’ve laid it out very nicely.
In the interest of thinking seriously about this potential deadly conflict, could you explain why you lean toward abandoning Taiwanese independence if war appears likely? Aside from principle based stances about protecting potential allies and the right of countries to continue governing themselves, I think my main worry is that giving in to bullying seems like it would incentivize future bullying. If the US and other nations declare that they no longer care about Taiwan, what stops superpowers in the future from using military aggression to stake a claim to some territory they had previously held at some point in the past few centuries?
On a related note, this same kind of approach would have suggested Ukraine give in to Russian demands and possibly even offer up the Donbas, which would likely have saved lives in 2022, but is it reasonable to expect that Russia would have been satisfied with that negotiation 5 or 10 years down the road?
The argument for abandoning Taiwan makes sense, ~25 million people’s independence may not be worth the chances of billions being killed in a nuclear exchange, but my perception of China and Russia is that there’s not some set of demands where you can give them what they want at the moment and then they’re satisfied, it seems more likely that new points of contention keep cropping up over time whether you give in to their demands or not.
It still seems like prefixing with “not” still runs into defining based on disagreement, where I would guess people who lean that way would rather be named for what they’re prioritizing as opposed to what they aren’t. I came up with a few (probably bad) ideas along that vein:
Immediatists (apparently not a made up word according to Merriam-Webster)
Contemporary altruists
Effective immediately
I’m relatively new so take my opinion with a big grain of salt. Maybe “not longtermist” is fine with most.
That’s really interesting, thanks! I wonder why India is so supportive of it in comparison to other countries.
One thing worth noting is that extinction and extreme economic collapse were excluded from all except 2 questions (GDP and total population) to make the forecasts more interpretable (more info on this in the appendix). This might explain some of the confidence you see, though it also might not!
This comment was copied from a reply I made on the EA forecasting and epistemics slack.
Fantastic! Thank you!
Is there a way to sort answers by newest? I’m not seeing that option. It would be useful for finding new answers I haven’t seen yet.
I always interpreted the 10% as a goal, not a requirement for EA. That’s a pretty high portion for a lot of people. I worry that making that sound like a cutoff makes EA seem even more inaccessible.
The way I had interpreted the community message was more like “an EA is someone that thinks about where their giving would be most effective or spends time working on the world’s most pressing problems.”
Great post as usual.
It looks like your Putin’s health link goes to the wrong forecast.
It’s a common misconception that those who want to mitigate AI risk think there’s a high chance AI wipes out humanity this century. But opinions vary and proponents of mitigating AI risk may still think the likelihood is low. Crowd forecasts have placed the probability of a catastrophe caused by AI as around 5% this century, and extinction caused by AI as around 2.5% this century. But even these low probabilities are worth trying to reduce when what’s at stake is millions or billions of lives. How willing would you be to take a pill at random from a pile of 100 if you knew 5 were poison? And the risk is higher for timeframes beyond this century.
I think the above could be improved with forecasts of extinction risk from prominent AI safety proponents like Yudkowsky and Christiano if they’ve made them but I’m not aware of whether they have or not.
It’s possible I missed it but I didn’t see anything stating whether multiple submissions from one author are allowed, I assume they are though?
That’s a good question, I’ve thought about this some before and while it’s kind of messy I think the general gist of my thoughts is something like this (framed from a US perspective but I think it generalizes to most countries):
Tariffs should be avoided or minimized wherever possible due to them likely costing US citizens much more than they benefit them. However tariffs and sanctions can be important tools when a country does something very offensive, particularly when punitive measures are applied in cooperation with allies. Tariffs and sanctions should be targeted toward the offensive behavior and scale with the importance of the offense.
So my rough framework isn’t that we should always avoid tariffs and sanctions, but that they should be limited, targeted to serve a purpose, and be in conjunction with our allies where possible. I think sanctions on China over the treatment of Uyghurs are justified and from what I’ve heard these have been targeted at the Xinjiang region and at Chinese entities involved.
Similarly, the Russian invasion warrants severe consequences, and sanctions are more effective here because they’ve been imposed in conjunction with allies. If China were to invade Taiwan or threaten to do so a similar response would be justified.
The big difference to me with the trade war was that it was based on a misguided attempt to fix our trade imbalance, which my impression is that most economists don’t really see as a problem. The idea also seemed to be to use tariffs as a bargaining chip to negotiate better trade practices such as IP protection. But these tariffs were applied unilaterally and don’t appear to be targeted at all, and never seemed likely to accomplish these goals. And in the meantime they’ve made things more expensive for Americans and have probably damaged relations with China with nothing to show for it.
I don’t know this area at all, but here is data from one review paper I found.
I didn’t have access to your link but I found another version of it here.
To be honest I’m not familiar with the direct evidence either so I’m mostly relying on secondhand impressions and general descriptions of tariff burdens falling on consumers. I searched around briefly just now and found this paper (also cited in the paper you linked as Amiti et al. (2020b)) which reports:
Using another year of data including significant escalations in the trade war, we find that U.S. tariffs continue to be almost entirely borne by U.S. firms and consumers.
However it’s not clear to me what the relationship is between tariff burden and the welfare loss estimates you mentioned in your comment. It seems to me like they could be measuring different things.
That’s a good point, I agree. None of my suggestions really fit very well, it’s hard to think of a descriptive name that could be easily used conversationally.
There are good points and helpful, thanks! I agree I wasn’t clear about viewing the scenarios exclusively in the initial comment, I think I made that a little clearer in the follow up.
when I read 80% to reach saturation at 40% predictive power I read this as “capping out at around 40%” which would only leave a maximum of 20% for scenarios with much greater than 40%?
Ah I think I see how that’s confusing. My use of the term saturation probably confuses things too much. My understanding is saturation is the likely maximum that could be explained with current approaches, so my forecast was an 80% chance we get to the 40% “saturation” level, but I think there’s a decent chance our technology/understanding advances so that more than the saturation can be explained, and I gave a 30% chance that we reach 80% predictive power.
That’s a good point about iterated embryo selection, I totally neglected that. My initial thought is it would probably overlap a lot with the scenarios I used, but I should have given that more thought and discussed it in my comment.
To be clear I’m not arguing that people shouldn’t think about it or try to solve it. I’m definitely in favor of more discussion on that topic and I’d love to read some high effort analysis from an EA perspective.
If I’m understanding correctly the main point you’re making is that I probably shouldn’t have said this:
There is little room for improvement here...
Which in that case that’s a fair critique. I’m not well-informed enough to know the options here and their advantages and risks in great detail, so my perception that there’s not much room for improvement could be way off base.
I’d summarize my position as having the perception that the Taiwan issue is a hard question that I’m not equipped to solve and I’m skeptical that there are significant improvements available there, so instead I focused on a topic that I view as low hanging fruit. Though I was probably wrong to characterize the Taiwan issue as futile or unimprovable, instead I should have characterized it as a highly complex issue that I’m not equipped to do justice to and I perceive as having substantial downsides to any shift in policy.
This is a good point, I completely agree that the trade war is of small importance relative to things like relations with Taiwan. My reason for focusing on the trade war though is because trade deescalation would have very few downsides and would probably be a substantial positive all on its own before even considering the potential positive effects it could have on relations with China and possibly nuclear risk.
To me the same can’t be said for the Taiwan issue. The optimal policy here is far from clear to me. Strategic ambiguity is our intentional policy, and I’m not sure clarifying our stance would be preferable to that. Committing to defend Taiwan could allow Taiwan to do more provocative things, which could lead to war. Declaring we will not defend Taiwan could empower China to invade. I agree it’s a significant issue that should be carefully considered, but it’s also an issue that I’m sure international relations experts have spilled huge amounts of ink over so I’m not sure if there are any clearly superior policy improvements available in this area.
This was a cool contest, thanks for running it! In my view there’s a lot of value in doing this. Doing a deep dive into polygenic selection for IQ was something I had wanted to do for quite a while and your contest motivated me to finally sit down and actually do it and to write it up in a way that would be potentially useful to others.
I think your initial criteria of how much a writeup changed your minds may have played a role in fewer than expected entries as well. Your forecasts on the set of questions seemed very reasonable and my own forecasts were pretty similar on the ones I had forecasted, so I didn’t feel that I had much to contribute in terms of the contest criteria for most of them.
Hopefully that’s helpful feedback to you or anyone else looking to run a contest like this in the future!