Denis Drescher

• Denis Drescher 20 Aug 2019 18:47 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: William_MacAskill's comment on: Ask Me Any­thing!

  ∸

• Denis Drescher 20 Aug 2019 18:28 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Denis Drescher's comment on: Ask Me Any­thing!

  Do I un­der­stand you cor­rectly that you’re rel­a­tively less wor­ried about ex­is­ten­tial risks be­cause you think they are less likely to be ex­is­ten­tial (that civ­i­liza­tion will re­bound) and not be­cause you think that the typ­i­cal global catas­tro­phes that we imag­ine are less likely?

• Denis Drescher 20 Aug 2019 18:25 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: William_MacAskill's comment on: Ask Me Any­thing!

  I’d like to vote for more de­tail on:

  I find (non-ex­tinc­tion) tra­jec­tory change more com­pel­ling as a way of in­fluenc­ing the long-run fu­ture than I used to.

  Un­less the change in im­por­tance is fully ex­plained by the rel­a­tive repri­ori­ti­za­tion af­ter up­dat­ing down­ward on ex­is­ten­tial risks.

• Denis Drescher 14 Aug 2019 16:03 UTC

  3 points

  on: Seek­ing feed­back on Cause Pri­ori­ti­za­tion Platform

  Cool idea!

  A few things I just no­ticed:

  1. It would be nice if the re­order­ing hap­pened only on reload and not im­me­di­ately. I some­times ticked an “im­por­tance” box fully in­tent to also tick an­other one, but then the block jumped away, and I’d have to go look­ing for it again.

  2. I sec­ond Saulius’s feed­back: I also feel like it’d be eas­ier for me to rate things on a three- or five-point scale or even with a slider. As it is, I’m tempted to tick al­most all the boxes on all prob­lems.

  3. I re­ally like your ini­tial se­lec­tion. I had a hard time vot­ing on an­i­mal welfare be­cause my as­sess­ments of farmed and wild an­i­mal welfare are so differ­ent. Then I no­ticed that you had an­ti­ci­pated my prob­lem and added the sub­sec­tions!

  4. The term tractable seems more in­tu­itive to me than solv­able, since the sec­ond can be mi­s­un­der­stood as whether the prob­lem can be fully solved as op­posed to the defi­ni­tion that Saulius cites.

  5. I’d like to make a dis­tinc­tion (and maybe a gran­u­lar one) be­tween whether I think a prob­lem is not im­por­tant/​ne­glected/​tractable or whether I have no opinion on it. E.g., I cur­rently don’t know whether the Pain Gap is tractably ad­dress­able, but not tick­ing the box feels as if I were say­ing that it’s not tractable.

  6. Not show­ing other peo­ple’s rat­ings could help avoid an­chor­ing peo­ple.

• Denis Drescher 5 Aug 2019 10:12 UTC

  5 points

  on: What types of or­ga­ni­za­tions would be ideal to be dis­tribut­ing fund­ing for EA? (Fel­low­ships, Or­ga­ni­za­tions, etc)

  A re­mote re­search or­ga­ni­za­tion for fund­ing and co­or­di­nat­ing on­go­ing in­di­vi­d­ual re­mote re­search efforts.

  I’d be in­ter­ested in this! In terms of co­or­di­na­tion, it could (1) pool in­for­ma­tion on what or­ga­ni­za­tions and in­di­vi­d­u­als are already work­ing on to al­low co­op­er­a­tion and men­tor­ship, and avoid du­pli­ca­tion un­less du­pli­ca­tion is use­ful; (2) give guidance on pri­ori­ti­za­tion of re­search ideas; and (3) provide a cu­rated, ac­cessible, and well cat­e­go­rized out­let (e.g., blog) for re­searchers that is suffi­ciently high-qual­ity that a lot of peo­ple read it.

• Denis Drescher 6 Jun 2019 18:39 UTC

  3 points

  on: A vi­sion for an­thro­pocen­trism to sup­plant wild an­i­mal suffering

  A ma­jor fac­tor in my calcu­lus is also that, given enough time, it’ll prob­a­bly be­come much more fea­si­ble to send non-biolog­i­cal life with­out any need for ter­raform­ing to planets out­side of our so­lar sys­tem than to send biolog­i­cal life, so that even in ter­raform­ing sce­nar­ios the ter­raform­ing will prob­a­bly be limited to just planets within the so­lar sys­tem.

• Denis Drescher 6 Apr 2019 12:48 UTC

  11 points

  on: Is vis­it­ing North Korea effec­tive?

  I’ve writ­ten a com­par­a­tive ar­ti­cle on plau­si­ble in­ter­ven­tion for hu­man rights in North Korea. The ac­tivists I in­ter­viewed had already con­sid­ered run­ning cam­paigns to dis­cour­age travel to North Korea be­cause tourism is an im­por­tant source of for­eign cur­rency for the gov­ern­ment. (They can force their cit­i­zens to stage North Korean life for tourists while pay­ing them in their worth­less na­tional cur­rency, so that they make a large profit on tourism.)

  To my knowl­edge, these ac­tivists never pur­sued that strat­egy be­cause it may ac­tu­ally be an at­ten­tion haz­ard and thus ac­tu­ally in­crease tourism, and be­cause it might strain re­la­tion­ships with or­ga­ni­za­tions that think that tourists may show North Kore­ans that other ways of life are pos­si­ble. But I find that im­plau­si­ble be­cause al­most no one is al­lowed to travel within North Korea (and tourists are even more tightly con­trol­led and re­stricted) so that it’s always only the same most loyal North Kore­ans who come into con­tact with tourists.

  But I dis­cuss other more promis­ing in­ter­ven­tions in the ar­ti­cle. For more de­tailed, re­li­able, and up-to-date in­for­ma­tion you can get in touch with, e.g., Saram as I’m not my­self ac­tive in the space.

• Denis Drescher 2 Apr 2019 12:12 UTC

  3 points

  on: Tool recom­men­da­tion: Po­lar per­sonal knowl­edge repository

  Very promis­ing! They have plans to cre­ate a mo­bile client, and maybe the web ver­sion will also even­tu­ally sup­port HTML and ebook for­mats. Look­ing for­ward to that!

• Denis Drescher 15 Mar 2019 17:25 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: aarongertler's comment on: Po­ten­tial Fund­ing Opportunity

  CFAR and En­com­pass (https://​​en­com­pass­move­ment.org/​​) might also fit the bill? Maybe also some (other) EA meta-char­i­ties whose cur­rent team con­figu­ra­tion I don’t re­mem­ber well enough.

• Denis Drescher 22 Feb 2019 12:17 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: ofer's comment on: Three Bi­ases That Made Me Believe in AI Risk

  I’d par­tic­u­larly ap­pre­ci­ate an up­dated ver­sion of “Astro­nom­i­cal waste, as­tro­nom­i­cal schmaste” that dis­en­tan­gles the as­tro­nom­i­cal waste ar­gu­ment from ar­gu­ments for the im­por­tance of AI safety. The cur­rent one makes it hard for me to en­gage with it be­cause I don’t go along with the as­tro­nom­i­cal waste ar­gu­ment at all but are still con­vinced that a lot of pro­jects un­der the um­brella of AI safety are top pri­ori­ties, be­cause ex­tinc­tion is con­sid­ered bad by a wide va­ri­ety of moral sys­tems ir­re­spec­tive of as­tro­nom­i­cal waste, and par­tic­u­larly in or­der to avert s-risks, which are also con­sid­ered bad by all moral sys­tems I have a grasp on.

• Denis Drescher 22 Feb 2019 12:07 UTC

  5 points

  on: Small an­i­mals have enor­mous brains for their size

  This is fas­ci­nat­ing! I’ve heard (though it may well be bunk) that in­tel­li­gence in hu­mans is some­what cor­re­lated with brain size but that the brain size is limited by the size of the birth canal. (Which made me think that c-sec­tion should lead to smarter peo­ple in the long run.) But if there’s still so much room for op­ti­miza­tion left with­out chang­ing the brain size, does that merely in­di­cate that the changes would take too many mu­ta­tions to be likely to hap­pen (sort of why we still have our weird eye ar­chi­tec­ture when other an­i­mals have straight­for­ward eyes) or that a lot of hu­man think­ing hap­pens at a lower ab­strac­tion level than that of the neu­ron so that, e.g., whole brain em­u­la­tion at a neu­ronal level would be des­tined to fail?

• Denis Drescher 4 Jan 2019 10:09 UTC

  2 points

  on: are val­ues a po­ten­tial ob­sta­cle in scal­ing the EA move­ment?

  Sem­i­nal for me has been Owen Cot­ton-Bar­ratt’s pa­per “How valuable is move­ment growth?” I there­fore wel­come the shift to­ward very care­ful if any growth that has hap­pened over the past years. To­day I think of the EA com­mu­nity like a startup of sorts that tries to hire slowly and se­lects staff care­fully based on cul­ture fit, char­ac­ter, com­mit­ment, etc.

• Denis Drescher 22 Dec 2018 13:00 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: cafelow's comment on: An­nounc­ing the EA dona­tion swap system

  Hi! Thank you! That sounds good (“Char­ity X” would be a free text field?), but I don’t know whether there are other prob­lems it doesn’t ad­dress. To guard against that, an FAQ en­try ex­plain­ing the prob­lem would be best. Gen­er­ally that’ll be needed be­cause this is prob­a­bly un­in­tu­itive for many peo­ple (like me), so even if they have the in­for­ma­tion about the swap coun­ter­fac­tual, they may not be able to use it op­ti­mally with­out an ex­pla­na­tion.

• Denis Drescher 22 Dec 2018 12:40 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: anonymous_ea's comment on: 2018 AI Align­ment Liter­a­ture Re­view and Char­ity Comparison

  Hmm, yeah, cu­ri­ous as well. Maybe it’s be­cause I link long es­says with­out sum­ma­riz­ing them, so peo­ple are left won­der­ing whether the es­says are rele­vant enough to be worth read­ing.

  But apart from the link to Si­mon’s re­ply, Kaj’s com­ment is much bet­ter than mine any­way.

• Denis Drescher 18 Dec 2018 15:00 UTC

  4 points

  on: 2018 AI Align­ment Liter­a­ture Re­view and Char­ity Comparison

  Wow! Thank you again for an­other amaz­ing overview! :-D

  With re­gard to the FRI sec­tion: Here is a re­ply to Toby Ord by Si­mon Knutsson and an­other piece that seems re­lated. (And by “suffer­ing fo­cus,” peo­ple are refer­ring to some­thing much broader than NU, which may be true of some CUs too.)

• Denis Drescher 3 Dec 2018 17:36 UTC

  2 points

  on: EA Global Light­ning Talks (San Fran­cisco 2018)

  Very in­ter­est­ing talks – thank you! For me, es­pe­cially Phillip Tram­mell’s talk.

• Denis Drescher 2 Dec 2018 12:18 UTC

  3 points

  on: An­nounc­ing the EA dona­tion swap system

  Thank you for cre­at­ing this! I want to un­der­stand some pos­si­ble risks to my value sys­tem bet­ter. So here’s one sce­nario that I’ve been think­ing about.

  I re­al­ize that it’s a trust sys­tem but if Donor A trusts Donor B on some­thing that is not clear enough to Donor A to be able to ask and that’s so un­re­mark­able to Donor B that they see no rea­son to tell Donor A about it any more than their espresso prefer­ences, then no one is re­ally at fault if they mis­com­mu­ni­cate.

  Say Donor A:

  1. is neu­tral be­tween Re­think Pri­ori­ties (RP) and the Against Malaria Foun­da­tion (AMF) (but Donor B doesn’t know this),

  2. can get tax ex­emp­tion for a dona­tion to RP but not AMF, and

  3. wants to donate $2k.

  And Donor B:

  1. val­ues a dol­lar to RP more than 100 times as highly as one to AMF (but Donor A doesn’t know this),

  2. can get tax ex­emp­tion for a dona­tion to AMF but not RP, and

  3. wants to donate $1k.

  Without dona­tion swap:

  1. Donor A is perfectly happy, and donates $2k to RP be­cause of the tax ex­emp­tion as tie breaker (but even if they split the dona­tion 50:50 or donate with 50% prob­a­bil­ity, this case is still prob­le­matic).

  2. Donor B is a bit sad but donates, say, $850 to RP, which comes down to the same cost to them due to the lack­ing tax break.

  3. In effect: RP gains $2,850 and AMF gains $0. Both donors are rea­son­ably happy with this re­sult, the only wrin­kle be­ing the taxes.

  But with dona­tion swap:

  1. Donor A loves helping their fel­low EAs and so offers a swap even though they don’t per­son­ally need it.

  2. Donor B en­thu­si­as­ti­cally takes them up on the offer to save the taxes, donates $1k to AMF, and Donor A donates $1k to RP. Later, Donor A donates their re­main­ing $1k to RP.

  3. In effect: RP gains $2k and AMF gains $1k. Slightly pos­i­tive for Donor A but big loss for Donor B.

  This seems like a plau­si­ble sce­nario to me but there are other sce­nar­ios that are less ex­treme but still very detri­men­tal to one side and pos­si­bly even harder to spot.

  So am I over­look­ing some­thing that alle­vi­ates this worry or do donors have to know (com­mit) and be trans­par­ent about where they will donate if no swap hap­pens, in or­der for the other party to know whether they should take them up on the offer?

• Denis Drescher 11 Nov 2018 13:05 UTC

  5 points

  on: Which World Gets Saved

  Very in­ter­est­ing! This strikes me as a par­tic­u­lar type of mis­sion hedg­ing, right?

• Denis Drescher 18 Oct 2018 19:24 UTC

  2 points

  on: An­nounc­ing the EA An­gel Group—Seek­ing EAs with the Time and Money to Eval­u­ate and Fund Early-Stage Grants

  I’d love to sub­scribe to a blog where you pub­lish what grants you’ve recom­mended. Are you plan­ning to run some­thing like that?

• Denis Drescher 2 Sep 2018 16:27 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: jaksim_duplicate0.9774940011688109's comment on: Cur­rent Think­ing on Pri­ori­ti­za­tion 2018

  Oh, cool! I’m read­ing that study at the mo­ment. I’ll be able to say more once I’m though. Then I’ll turn to your ar­ti­cle. Sounds in­ter­est­ing!