More generally, I am wary of using data in the past to predict a future, primarily because it breaks the IID distribution.
Most people self-select for very similar intelligence, often on the order of .85x-1.15x for 68% of humans (This is boosted by self selection.) 99.7% of all humans are in the range of .55x-1.45x in intelligence.
The IID assumption allows us to interpolate arbitrarily well, but once the assumption breaks, things turn bad fast.
It doesn’t link to greater wrong, instead it links to the deleted post.
True, and the real question is what’s going on with this post.
Also, there’s this link on April 1, 2022, several months before, warning against this type of thinking. Go to Q4 for the answer.
More specifically, it was insane for EA to stake so much money on something that could wipe out your entire value.
Disagree. This is like saying, “Amazon shouldn’t sort by 1 star, because otherwise it will get a bad reputation for selling bad products.”
That’s wrong. People still have the option of sorting by whatever they choose. But the forum should give more visibility to posts that break people out of their comfort zone, should they desire.
The reason I disagree is in my view, the internet already rewards controversiality and outrage way too much, and this is something that makes the EA forum much better because they avoid outrage and controversiality driving the process.
But in your third point (and maybe your second?) you seem to be defending the idea that even if SBF wilfully misused funds, then that’s still ok. It was a bad bet, but we should celebrate people who take risky, but positive EV, gambles, even if they strongly violate ethical norms. Is that a fair summary of what you believe, or am I misreading/misunderstanding? If it is, I think this post is very bad and it seems very worrying that it’s currently got +ve karma.
Specifically, he talks about while the heuristic “don’t do fraud” is a good heuristic to have, “don’t do mistakes” is not a good heuristic at all, and this is trivially true.
We can’t expect people to be perfect and never make mistakes, so why are you disagreeing with this.
As far as I was concerned, by 24-36 hours(D+1-D+1.5) after the liquidity crisis turned fraud, I already raised the hypothesis of outright stealing and fraud to serious attention, and 48-72 hours after the crisis first broke (D+2-D+3) I assumed fraud and stealing was happening there. I also was right to distrust crypto several months before, because it’s very structure lends it to fraud, with no other legal use.
Links here:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/04/why-cryptocurrency-is-a-giant-fraud
Are you saying that humans show too much loss aversion and risk aversion, and these ‘biases’ are maladaptive (unaligned with evolution)? Or that humans don’t show enough loss aversion and risk aversion, compared to what evolution would have favored?
Yes, in both cases.
The basic issue is ignoring heavy tails to the right is going to give you too much risk-averseness, while heavy tails to the left will give you too much risk-seeking.
An example of a heavy tail to the left is finance, where riskiness blows you up, but doesn’t give you that much more to donate. Thus, SBF too much risk, and took too much wrong-way risk in particular.
An example of a heavy tail to the right is job performance, where the worst is a mediocre job performance, while the best can be amazing. This, there is likely not enough risk aversion.
Link here:
And we need to be clear: The world we are living in with complicated societies and newfangled phones now would be totally against evolution’s values, so that’s why I brought up the misalignment talk from AI safety.
I have the answer, and it is right in my quote.
Also, we are severely misaligned with evolution, to the point that in certain areas, we (according to evolution), are inner misaligned and outer misaligned, thus our goals can be arbitrarily different goals than what evolution has as it’s goal.
It’s a textbook inner alignment and outer alignment failure.
More accurately, the big assumption here is that impact can’t be negative. This is of course not an assumption that is actually true, which is the issue here.
I disagree, and I view Joseph Richardson’s comment as why it’s limited to finance rather than indicating a systemic problem:
Although EA risk attitudes may have played a role in FTX’s demise, I think to the extent that is true it is due to the peculiar nature of finance rather than EA advice being wrong in most instances. Specifically, impact in most areas (e.g., media, innovations, charitable impact) is heavily right-tailed but financial exchanges have a major left-tailed risk of collapse. As human expectations of success are heavily formed and biased by our most recent similar experiences, this will cause people to not take enough risk when the value is in the right tail (as median<mean) and take on too much when there are major failures in the left tail (as median>mean).
If this is true, we may need to consider which specific situations have these left-tailed properties and to be cautious about discouraging too much risk taking in those domains. However, I suspect that this situation may be very rare and has few implications for what EAs should do going forwards.
My initial guess is $200 million was given to EA, so this should be a first point to update on.
The reaction to this post (and my comments) exemplifies a dynamic I’ve seen before on the Forum, where people’s posts are disregarded, criticized, downvoted etc because they are emotional, impressionistic, openly angered or outraged, emphatic… etc, and praised for being detached, dry, measured, caveat-ed… We should care about epistemics, but I think sometimes readers of the Forum are not charitable enough to people who communicate in different ways to them.
Maybe because those caveats are really important, if you want to actually improve things and not just cause chaos.
Like, there’s a failure mode that’s really common where there’s anger at a problem, and that anger fuels solutions that wouldn’t actually solve the problem, then try to implement it and get surprised at how much the policy is failing, never considering that caveats and measures always mattered, and they’re just too angry to notice the problems with their solution.
It’s a good thing that EA rejects the notion in practice on social media, that controversy and anger = good. They aren’t that good in practice.
Thanks for verifying that for me.
Eh, let’s not overrate how much abstract arguments actually work to achieve their goals. Now the broader EA sphere has responded surprisingly well, but we need to move beyond abstract words, and instead focus more on what they actually do.
These were the big ones.
Or more sinisterly, he hacked it himself, and is trying to steal all of his customer’s money.
More generally, the assumption that returns can’t be negative is the worrying assumption. Either SBF didn’t realize that or he thought that depositors didn’t matter.