Denis Drescher(Denis Drescher)

• Denis Drescher 2 May 2021 14:28 UTC

  6 points

  on: How do you stay emo­tion­ally mo­ti­vated while work­ing on highly spe­cific prob­lems?

  The article “Why I find longtermism hard, and what keeps me motivated” by Michelle Hutchinson seems related:

  I find working on longtermist causes to be – emotionally speaking – hard: There are so many terrible problems in the world right now. How can we turn away from the suffering happening all around us in order to prioritise something as abstract as helping make the long-run future go well?

  A lot of people who aim to put longtermist ideas into practice seem to struggle with this, including many of the people I’ve worked with over the years. And I myself am no exception – the pull of suffering happening now is hard to escape. For this reason, I wanted to share a few thoughts on how I approach this challenge, and how I maintain the motivation to work on speculative interventions despite finding that difficult in many ways.

  This issue is one aspect of a broader issue in EA: figuring out how to motivate ourselves to do important work even when it doesn’t feel emotionally compelling. It’s useful to have a clear understanding of our emotions in order to distinguish between feelings and beliefs we endorse and those that we wouldn’t – on reflection – want to act on.

[Question] How do you stay emo­tion­ally mo­ti­vated while work­ing on highly spe­cific prob­lems?

• Denis Drescher 13 Apr 2021 9:16 UTC

  2 points

  on: My per­sonal cruxes for fo­cus­ing on ex­is­ten­tial risks /​ longter­mism /​ any­thing other than just video games

  Thanks for telling me about this post!

  I answered Brian’s questions at one point, which struck me as an interesting exercise. I suppose most of your questions here are semi-empirical questions to me thanks to evidential cooperation, and ones whose answers I don’t know. I’m leaning in different directions from you on some of them at the moment.

• Denis Drescher 9 Apr 2021 7:52 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: MaxDalton’s comment on: Cause Area: Hu­man Rights in North Korea

  Thank you kindly!

• Denis Drescher 9 Apr 2021 7:03 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: vaidehi_agarwalla’s comment on: Cause Area: Hu­man Rights in North Korea

  Thank you for your comprehensive comment! :-D

  I’ve added a note to the post that I accidentally changed the publishing date of it yesterday. I wanted to edit it but made it a draft instead, and when I reversed that, it must’ve bumped the date. All of this information is 3–4 years out of date.

  Today I would approach things differently in three main ways:

  1. I would put a strong emphasis on trying to determine the robustness of all candidate interventions, by which I mean how likely I think they are to backfire in terrible ways, how many such ways I can think of, whether they can be preempted, or monitored and responded to, or whether they are more likely to happen suddenly and irreversibly or unknowably.

  2. I would take more seriously the possibility that extreme suffering is worse than median-levels of suffering by factors of 10, 100, or 1000 than by a factor of around 2. That would make the suffering in concentration camps and that of factory-farmed chickens vastly more important than it appears according to the calculations here.

  3. I would ask how this problem interacts with other problems, especially those that I deem even more urgent and important. For example, would a more human rights–respecting North Korea (or a united Korea under a South Korea–like government) improve existential security? Might it decrease the probability of some s-risks? Or would activism in this area, especially EA-adjacent activism, detract from the talent pools, funding, or attention that other problems, such as AI policy, have/​receive?

  Comparing the US prison population & NK: Yes, that comparison only serves to get an idea of the scale but leaves open how many comparatively difficult subproblems we’re dealing with in each case, what interventions there are to address them severally or all together, and hence how tractable the most tractable ones of these interventions are and at what rate they’re becoming less tractable up to the point where the problem is largely solved.

  Estimates of total GDP lost in NK: I think I agree. Only two comments: (1) I think all the interventions I came up with except for the one concerning safer escape routes are either “meta” or aim at destabilizing the regime as a whole. Whatever connects and empowers the North Korean population or weakens the government makes it more likely that the government can be overthrown or at least becomes irrelevant. And (2), maybe the recovery of the former German Democratic Republic could be seen as a best-case scenario because there there was also a more developed part of the same country that it could reunite with and receive support from. But I think the cultural differences between North and South Korea are more extreme at this point than the differences between GDR and FRD.

  Neglectedness: Indeed! But I don’t. I think people at Saram or the ICNK may have estimates though. I would imagine that government grants are transparent and that the charities in the space also publish their financials. Maybe the financials of the Ministry of Unification (other than grants) or South Korean intelligence are harder to know.

  Tractability: Yes, I think that should be possible to estimate at least for someone who speaks Korean because a lot of North Koreans eventually flee to South Korea where they receive support and so are known to the authorities. The charities that support them to get through and out of China are often US-based, so maybe there’s even English-language information on this.

  Intervention—Capacity building: Thank you! The first part is a mix of the idea that capacity building is a convergent instrumental goal in a lot of contexts and a general impression I got from discussions in EA. The second part may not be true. What I think was true at the time was that the space had these Attribution Moloch type of dynamics going on that made organizations more secretive and suspicious of each other. I don’t know if that’s still the case. But even without that problem, they may still not be able to do their research completely in the open because then the North Korean government can react to it more easily. For example, if you send aid via balloons into North Korea, the North Korean government can launch identical balloons of their own, ostensibly coming from the south, but with poisoned products or misinformation.

  Thanks again for all your comments! I probably won’t write an updated version of the article, but I hope someone else will want to dig deeper!

• Denis Drescher 6 Apr 2021 8:02 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Aaron Gertler’s comment on: Our plans for host­ing an EA wiki on the Forum

  Thanks for the clarification, and looking forward to the stub finder system! :-)

• Denis Drescher 4 Apr 2021 15:26 UTC

  2 points

  on: Our plans for host­ing an EA wiki on the Forum

  Adding more details about the topic

  Quick question to understand how I can help here: Is this about editing the texts on the tag pages themselves or about writing articles that plug gaps in the content that is covered by the articles that have a certain tag? If it’s the first, is there a way to quickly get a ranking of the most stub-like tag pages?

  Thanks! I love this!

• Denis Drescher 23 Mar 2021 14:41 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: Ask Re­think Pri­ori­ties Any­thing (AMA)

  Heh, great find! :-D

• Denis Drescher 18 Mar 2021 9:04 UTC

  9 points

  on: How can I han­dle de­pic­tions of suffer­ing bet­ter emo­tion­ally?

  My problem used to be a bit different, but maybe my tips from Dissociation for Altruists are still helpful for you!

  Some people do not lack in altruism and are well aware of effectiveness considerations too, but the sheer magnitude of suffering that effective interventions would force them to face is too unbearable for them to acknowledge. I give tips on how they can use dissociation to put altruism on a more scalable basis.

[Question] How to get up to speed on a new field of re­search?

• Denis Drescher 24 Feb 2021 13:25 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: Fore­cast­ing Prize Results

  Thank you! I read it like that, and I’m happy about the feedback too!

  And I agree with it. It’s not like you can peek into my Google Drive. ^.^

• Denis Drescher 23 Feb 2021 2:05 UTC

  6 points

  on: Fore­cast­ing Prize Results

  Thank you! I’m honored to have won a prize! (For “How might better collective decision-making backfire?”) :-D

  Thank you also to the people who’ve contributed answers!

  To respond to the quasi-questions about the post:

  In particular, there was no discussion about which concerns were or would have been historically important.

  Yeah, that’d be very interesting! I don’t know if I’ll find someone with the right expertise who I can get interested in researching this. Many of them are broadly applicable to the whole LW and rationality project, so I bet there are people with the right expertise and interests somewhere out there, though.

  It is also unclear whether any practical actions will be taken as a result of the post, or whether it will be built upon.

  My motivation for asking about it was that software I’m developing. I’ve started a write-up of my approach and reasoning behind it. Roughly, I categorize the risks by how urgent it is for us to address them and by how plausible it is that we can react to them rather than having to prevent them. I’ll probably continue that write-up once I’ve moved to my new place and worked on the software some more.

  Congratulations also to all the other winners!

• Denis Drescher 6 Feb 2021 16:45 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Chi’s comment on: How to work with self-con­scious­ness?

  Woah! Thank you for all these very concrete tips! A lot of great ideas for me to pick from. :-D

[Question] How to work with self-con­scious­ness?

• Denis Drescher 17 Jan 2021 18:15 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: EdoArad’s comment on: How do you bal­ance read­ing and think­ing?

  Thank you! Also for the answer on the first question! (And thanks for encouraging me to go for this format.)

[Question] How do you bal­ance read­ing and think­ing?

• Denis Drescher 5 Jan 2021 2:31 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Monica’s comment on: Can I have im­pact if I’m av­er­age?

  I think the most important message in your message is the one about doing the most with the resources that one has. I think there is a form of contentment that should be highly rewarded socially. I for one am very impressed when I see someone who is not in the top ~ 1% and yet is motivated to do their best. (I want to be like that too.)

  Yet I want to add a less important note to the second part: Very impactful roles (I’m thinking of the world at large here, not EA) tend to filter for people with a certain recklessness. A certain president comes to mind, but I even think that someone as skilled as Elon Musk has so far probably had a vastly net-negative impact. So there is a separate skill of thoughtfulness that might have a huge effect on one’s impact too.

• Denis Drescher 5 Jan 2021 1:54 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Ardenlk’s comment on: Can I have im­pact if I’m av­er­age?

  Yeah, I’m super noncompetitive, and yet, when I fear that I might replace someone who would’ve done a better job – be it because there is no interview process or I don’t trust the process to be good enough – I get into this compare-y mindset and shy away from it completely.

[Question] How do you ap­proach hard prob­lems?

• Denis Drescher 2 Jan 2021 11:48 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: Erich_Grunewald’s comment on: Donat­ing to EA funds from Germany

  If I remember correctly, German law requires that the charity that writes the donation certificate has control of or at least documents how the donations were invested. (Not sure which of the two requirements it was.) I think that is why the forwarding to the EA Funds had to be discontinued. The EA Funds pool all the donations and then allocate them at their discretion, so it’s not possible for the German charity to control how the donations are used, and it’s probably difficult or impossible to know what project was supported to what degree by which donation.