timunderwood

Karma: 1,003

timunderwood Jan 13, 2023, 1:15 PM
30 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: freedomandutility’s comment on: A personal response to Nick Bostrom’s “Apology for an Old Email”
My bad

timunderwood Jan 13, 2023, 12:58 PM
35 points
11 ∶ 31
in reply to: britomart’s comment on: CEA statement on Nick Bostrom’s email
The community needs to split. Basically high cognitive decouplers and low decouplers can’t live together online anymore. And if the EA brand is going to attack the high decoupler way of thinking for the sake of making people like britomart happy—which might be the right choice, there needs to be a new community for altruists who are oriented towards working through any argument themselves, no matter what it implies.

Mainly, the ea brand and community are tools for doing good, but currently the way they are functioning no longer work quite right.

Probably because CEA is problematic, and because of the recent recruitment drives that brought a lot of people who weren’t coming from the rationalist meme space in, abd this naturally leads to culture clashes.

Also maybe things are still okay off the forums.

timunderwood Jan 13, 2023, 11:34 AM
14 points
7 ∶ 6
in reply to: freedomandutility’s comment on: A personal response to Nick Bostrom’s “Apology for an Old Email”
We aren’t debating race. We are debating whether it is Bostrom’s job to lie about his view of an ambiguous evidence base as a response to something he said twenty five years ago in a totally different community with different standards and goals.

timunderwood Dec 17, 2022, 4:20 PM
66 points
34 ∶ 2
on: Effective altruism is worse than traditional philanthropy in the way it excludes the extreme poor in the global south.
“What can we do to help improve this situation?”
Before we assume there is a situation that needs to be improved, it is important to make clear that there is a problem. The existence of an article from someone in an extremely poor place saying that EA has not helped his community is not compelling evidence that there is a problem with how EA is using its resources.

The total cash flow through from AMF, the deworming programs and Give Directly through their whole history is probably in the area of 1-2 billion dollars. Or something like 2-4 dollars per extremely poor person.

Obviously this hasn’t made a big direct impact on the day to day life of a random poor person in a random poor country . It isn’t enough money.
So the question that we actually want to answer is: Given the actual quantity of resources we have available to put towards extremely poor countries, would that tiny amount of resources do more good per dollar if we adopted the proposals put forward here? Alternatively, would these proposals allow us to mobilize more rich Western person money, until there is enough being donated to actually fill the holes?

timunderwood Dec 2, 2022, 2:14 PM
8 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Ben Auer’s comment on: Hubris and coldness within EA (my experience)
My view is that there should be a ‘weird, rationalist/ philosophical altruistic community’ that is allowed to be as inhuman, non-amiable, etc as it wants to be, and that is a good thing because it is an useful sort of place for certain types of people to find each other and interact, and because it will come up with ideas that wouldn’t be found if this group was thoroughly mixed with other sub groups of people.

timunderwood Nov 27, 2022, 9:08 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vgvt’s comment on: What videos should Rational Animations make?
Require people building biospheres to stick nanotech in the brains of anything that can feel pain to make sure it doesn’t get bad enough to stop being fun?

I don’t think this is the place that a soft negative utilitarian actually breaks with a soft total utilitarian transhumanist.

timunderwood Nov 16, 2022, 12:49 PM
24 points
6 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sabs’s comment on: Who’s at fault for FTX’s wrongdoing
I mean he is a big sports fan, at least baseball, at least when he was younger. I got linked to his blog from 10 years ago from something, and the number one and two sets of posts were about baseball statistics.

timunderwood Nov 13, 2022, 3:47 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: A Newcomer’s Critique of EA—Underprioritizing Systems Change?
Summoning AI Jesus is the ultimate system change?

I think people who want really big meta changes get drawn to AI issues—where I do think that your perspective gets at something really important is that summoning an AI god who doesn’t kill is all immediately does not mean that everyone will have access to good things and control over their lives automatically.

I think a really underemphasized cause area is creating policies and institutions to ensure that success in ai alignment creates an utopia for everyone, rather than allowing a tiny group of people to control everything forever.

timunderwood Nov 13, 2022, 3:41 PM
25 points
11 ∶ 8
on: Hubris and coldness within EA (my experience)
“In my opinion, a new more inclusive organisation with a focus on making a positive impact needs to be created—with a better name.”

This seems right to me, and it should be focused on recruiting in a different part of the population, and having a very different culture than EA. Of course the end goal should still be doing lots of good in the world as efficiently as possible.

At the same time, EA and the EA brand should remain, and without any big cultural changes (ie still mostly utilitarian, nerd, philosophy grad, using explicit EV calculations, and jargon heavy).

We need more than one effectiveness focused altruism brand.

timunderwood Nov 13, 2022, 10:59 AM
8 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: elifland’s comment on: How could we have avoided this?
You expect the people being given free cash to do a better job of due diligence than the people handing someone a giant cash pile?

Not to mention that the Future Fund donations probably did more good for EA causes than the reputational damage is going to do harm to them (making the further assumption that this is actually net reputational damage, as opposed to a bunch of free coverage that pushes some people off and attracts some other people).

timunderwood Nov 12, 2022, 11:00 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Knowing the cost of SBF’s fraud, what size donation to effective causes would have made it ethical? $1B? $5B?
lol
Under which ethical system?

timunderwood Oct 24, 2022, 9:29 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: CB🔸’s comment on: The great energy descent (short version) - An important thing EA might have missed
The main point about EROI, and I don’t think we disagree on this, is that the raw amount of produced energy that needs to be put in is only one factor. You also need to know how much human labor has to be put in, and how much physical stuff has to be put in.

I’d note a lot of the complaints here that in a bad EROI environment with needing to build more stuff, you are also running out of key metals is double counting. The reason that the EROI is 2 to 1 in that scenario, instead of 10 to 1 is because we’ve run out of the easy sources of those metals, so pointing out that the metals are also hard to acquire in that context doesn’t say anything new.
“Since there is a strong coupling between GDP and material use and resource use (at a global level), it would make sense that an increasing material and energetic cost translates to an increased financial cost. “

I don’t know if I really want to dig into this very deeply, since it involves a familiarity with economics that you clearly don’t have, but theings like this claim, and the ’99 percent correlation between energy use and gdp growth’ simply do not mean what you think they mean.

For example, you might get a correlation that is nearly as strong between gdp growth and fast food purchases, or clothes purchases, or home improvement purchases, or almost anything except for medical and government spending.

That is what a recession literally is: It is when people buy less of stuff that can be cut back on easily. And booms are when people buy more of that stuff. You are going to find extremely high correlations between gdp growth and any variable consumption good if you are looking for that, but it is meaningless in terms of saying what is causally important for allowing continued economic growth.

In a similar way that recessions usually follow very high energy prices (which is causal), does not actually mean that the economy cannot deal with energy taking up that big of a proportion of total resources without going into a permanent recession. It means that if in a given year everyone has to spend way more money on energy, they won’t have as much money left to spend on everything else they want, so they will buy less of it, so the economy will enter a recession.

But if the energy prices stayed high, this would be a one time thing, where improvements in productivity through out the economy would allow higher profits and wages again, and thus with the fixed high energy price, they would be able to purchase more non energy things in year two of high energy prices than in year one—ie the economy would be growing.

Having ten percent of the economy go to a sector simply doesn’t mean the other sectors can’t keep increasing total output per capita over time. For example, in most countries the health care sector has been becoming bigger and bigger relative to the total economy over time. In the US it is around 20 percent of the economy now, while it was 7 or 8 percent (I think) in the 80s. Despite this, the non health care sectors have consitently been getting bigger at the same time. Of course the giant allocation of resources to health care does cause bad things, and we are poorer than we would be if all health care happened by magic and didn’t cost anything, and it possibly has crowded out capital investments that would have led to growth elsewhere, and thus we are poorer in dynamic terms in addition to static terms due to health care costs. But it has not, and will not, cause a permanent recession (ie the rest of the economy makes fewer things per person each year until at the limit nothing is ever made) if it gets sufficiently big.

timunderwood Oct 14, 2022, 3:46 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Miguel Lima Medín 🔸’s comment on: The great energy descent (short version) - An important thing EA might have missed
It doesn’t really defend the concept of minimum EROI as a thing that actually makes sense. My whole point is that minumum EROI of creating the seperate pieces of an energy system makes no concept.

A very bad EROI where the components are extremely cheap in terms of other resources is fine, a very high EROI where the components are extremely expensive in terms of other recources can’t be used.

Imagine a completely automated robot that is building solar panels in space, and beaming the excess energy to earth. It doesn’t matter to us right now if it used 1 (ie an EROI of 100 to 1) percent of the energy to maintain the system, or 99 percent (an EROI of 1.01 to 1), because it isn’t using any terrestial resources.

On its own, minimum EROI is a nonsense phrase. It only makes sense once you’ve specified the whole technological package and environmental context.
You have an equation with multiple terms in it. EROI is only one term, and sufficiently large changes in the other terms can compensate for changes in EROI.

timunderwood Oct 11, 2022, 2:57 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: CB🔸’s comment on: The great energy descent (short version) - An important thing EA might have missed
So you are doing useful work by identifying a serious potential problem and trying to get the rest of us to take it seriously. As a neural circuit in the global brain it is a good thing that the Peak Oil movement exists.

I’m not quite sure how to approach this because you are making a conceptual mistake with this argument and I want you to actually see what it is. And I think this is a case where there is a clear truth of the matter that we can both get to and agree on.

But since there was also an argument you had in the comments on your google doc with someone pointing out the same thing I am here, it is clear that there is something about this issue that is hard for your mind to jump to seeing. At the same time it is perhaps is a bit hard for me to explain it, since my mind immediately sees it intuitively.

First I am making a narrow point.
If my point is correct, it is still totally possible that peak oil is the correct model.

I am begging you, try to just pay attention to the point, and decide if you think it is correct, and only afterwards ask if it has any broader implications.
The purpose of my arguing here, is to help you improve your economic model on this single point, and not to change your broader point of view.

With that long preface, my simple point is this: The EROI is not enough to tell you what portion of civilization’s real resources go to energy production. You need more information.
An EROI of 2:1 is not enough to tell you if the energy system requires 1 percent of GDP or 10 times the world’s total GDP. You need more information than just the EROI.
I think you already know this, since you were trying to point at evidence from historical recessions and economic performance to figure out what the economic impact of changes in EROI would be, since just saying EROI of 2:1 does not actually say ’50%’, the 50% comes from using additional information to figure out the economic impact of that number.
To establish that EROI alone does not tell you anything about the percent of GDP that goes to it, I am now going to describe a fake, fictional, toy model of a world. This is not the real world. This is a model. But this sort of model is useful for understanding constraints that exist in the actual real world. Telling me that the extreme cases in this fake, fictional, not real world are in fact fake is not an argument against what I’m saying. What I am trying to establish is that we need at least three parameters to figure out what portion of real resources go to energy production.
EROI is only one of them . I am not saying anything about what the actual value of the other parameter is here, just that any positive EROI is consistent with any GDP % depending on what the other parameters are.
In the following argument, we are going to assume the stated EROI includes all energy costs that are physically necessary to produce energy producing equipment. So it includes the costs of roads, the machines to build the roads, the machines to maintain the roads, and the machines used to build the machines. Otherwise it isn’t the actual EROI.
So to start, what we want to figure out is what part of GDP is required to produce electricity.
A start point could be this equation:
Cost of energy system = Amount of energy producing equipment required * resource cost to make each unit of energy producing equipment
Where does EROI come into the cost of the energy system? It isn’t yet here. Let’s try breaking down one of the terms:
Amount of energy producing equipment required = produced total energy / energy produced per unit of equipment.
A further break down of the equation

Produced total energy = Produced net energy + Produced waste energy

Now EROI is the ratio of total energy to waste energy (EROI = total energy/ total waste energy). So an EROI of 2:1 imples that for every two units of energy produced, there will be 1 unit of waste energy produced and one unit of net energy.

So inserting this into the equation after doing a bit of algebra to get rid of waste energy we get that:
1 = net energy/ total energy + 1/EROI = net energy/ total energy + ¹⁄₂ ==>
¹⁄₂ = net energy /total energy ==> total energy / 2 = net energy ==> 2*net energy = total energy.

So now that we’ve incorporated EROI into this term in the equation, we can go back to the orignal equation:

In the case of an EROI of 2 is:
Cost of energy system = 2* net energy produced / energy produced per unit of equipment * cost per unit of equipment.
What is the information that we do not have at this point?
We don’t know how much net energy is produced—that is still a parameter. We don’t know how much equipment we need to make that amount of energy. And we don’t know how much the equipment costs.

What we do know is that an EROI of 2 means that we need twice as many pieces of equipment as we would need with an obviously impossible infinite EROI (if EROI is infinite, then there is no waste energy term, so net energy = total energy). But that is all the EROI tells us.

This is the end of the section that I actually care about you understanding and agreeing with. The rest of it is arguing, not trying to correct a clear mistake. I do think it is interesting and relevant so I’ll leave it.

I did some googling, and it seems that the total consumption of all sources of energy in the world is around 150 million gigawatt hours a year. Some other googling says that 370 watts of installed solar capacity in California or Arizona produces around 2.5 kilowatt hours of energy per day on average. Lets assume the average efficiency of solar panels is somewhat lower than that, and 370 watts installed will produce 2 kilowatt hours in the average location they are actually used.

So if we had an EROI of 2, to get 150 million gigawatt hours of energy per year, we’d need to produce a total of 300 million gigawatt hours of energy per year. This could then be done with 150,000 gigawatts of installed solar capacity. This would probably require ¹⁄₅₀₀ of the world’s surface to be covered with solar panels. So now we know how much equipment is needed to replace the current global energy system with solar. Or one part of it at least, since there is also the storage systems and conversions systems.

Would doing this require 50 percent of the world’s gdp?
The answer is: It still depends on how much the solar panels cost.
Currently it seems that utility scale solar has a price of around 1 dollar/ watt installed. At that price this would be a 150 trillion dollar investment, assume the panels only last twenty years on average, and you have this system costing 7.5 trillion usd a year to maintain. That is less than 10% of global GDP, and I seriously doubt that pumped hydro storage systems and the need to figure out some way to get high temperature metallurgy and jet fuel are going to get you a vastly highly levelized cost.

Suppose we run out of key metals, and the substitutes are equally expensive, and then the solar panels cost way more than they do now, and we end up having to use concentrated solar for 5x as much money as current photovoltaics (conentrated solar does not depend upon any exotic metals that there is any chance we will run low on, aluminum and steel are sufficient). Then this costs 5 dollars per watt, it turns into a 750 trillion investment, and costs thirty five trillion a year to maintain, and around ¹⁄₃ of global gdp—that would be pretty bad.
Or we have way better general automation and techniques, the production cost curve continues to go down, and we have lots of cheap solar panels, and they only cost .20 cents per installed watt—and then you have the whole thing accomplished for 30 trillion dollars, and the system globally doesn’t take more money than the US defence department.

If solar panels end up at 100 dollars per watt due to resources running out, it would be impossible to support the current energy consumption with an investment of 100% of gdp. etc, etc.

All of this goes back to the point: You need to know the cost, not the EROI. If the cost is small, doubling it doesn’t matter. If the cost is big, you already are in trouble before you double it.
But saying ’50%′ due to EROI of 2 is nonsense. EROI only increases or decreases the amount of resources needed to get a given amount of net energy, it doesn’t tell you anything about what percent of society’s total resources are needed to produce that amount of net energy.

timunderwood Oct 3, 2022, 4:34 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Robin’s comment on: The great energy descent (short version) - An important thing EA might have missed
“So let’s imagine an EROI [for solar panels] of 2:1. That would mean that, to simplify, half of our society’s resources go toward producing energy. Let’s say this means that, roughly, 50% of people are working in the energy sector (directly or indirectly), which is already huge.”

I’ll probably finish reading/ skimming your longer document in a bit, but there is a clear mistake in this sentence, and I think if you consider it for long enough, you will realize it severely and perhaps fatally undercuts the entire argument you are making.

If solar panels had an EROI of 2 to 1, and all our energy came from solar panels, you then need to make two solar panels for every single one that you are using for net energy generation. This doubles the cost of using solar panels from what it would be with an infinite EROI, which doubles the amount of resources (excluding returns and costs of scale effects) required to make enough solar panels to run our civilization on. So if with infinite EROI you needed to make say 1 quadrillion kilowatt hours worth of solar panels to run your civilization, now you need to make 2 quadrillion kilowatt hours worth, since half of them will be used up in the process of making the rest.

The point is, this says nothing about whether 50 percent of society’s resources are being used to make these solar panels, or 1 percent, because that depends on how hard it is to make solar panels.

If it is very easy to make and deploy solar panels, any positive rate of return on EROI is fine, while of it is extremely expensive and hard to make them, we can’t transition even of the EROI is infinite.

timunderwood Sep 19, 2022, 2:30 PM
5 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Why doesn’t WWOTF mention the Bronze Age Collapse?
First quick note: Spans much of the Mediterranean region is still local.
Second, while I of course wasn’t the author, I wouldn’t have talked about it much if we were, because we simply don’t know enough about it for it to make sense to draw any weight bearing conclusions from the details of the Bronze Age collapse.

timunderwood Jul 24, 2022, 9:15 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Guy Raveh’s comment on: On Elitism in EA
So what concretely and scaleably can people who don’t need help because they have lots of resources (and thus they are actually capable of helping) do to figure out what the people who need help actually need, that the EA community is not doing?

timunderwood Jun 9, 2022, 12:51 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: AnaDoe’s comment on: Arguments for Why Preventing Human Extinction is Wrong
Shrug, and Hitler was a vegetarian.

That an attitude is similar to Putin’s attitude is not an argument for it being wrong—I suppose it is an sort of decent argument for it being dangerous.

I mean Putin is obviously right (to any consistent consequentialist) that there are things worth killing, destroying, wrecking, and even torturing to protect. My disagreement with him is about either what those things are, and whether this violence actually achieves them.

I find the criticism of long-termism that it can potentially motivate horrifying behavior very compelling. I just don’t think the critics are offering an alternative way to act in cases where the stakes are really that high. Though I agree with the epistemic criticism that, a) when you think the stakes are that high, you are particularly likely to be wrong about something, and b) you are also particularly likely to be focusing on a bad set of methods for achieving your goals.

timunderwood Jun 9, 2022, 12:41 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: tamgent’s comment on: Unflattering reasons why I’m attracted to EA
Ummmm, so we say we want to do good, but we actually want to make friends and get laid, so we figure out ways to ‘do good’ that leads to lots of hanging out with interesting people,and chances to demonstrate how cool we are to them. Often these ways of ‘doing good’ don’t actually benefit anyone who isn’t part of the community.

This is at least the worry, which I think is a separate problem from Goodharting, ie when the cea provides money to fly someone from the US to go to an eagx conference in Europe, I don’t think there is any metric that is trying to be maximized, but rather just a vague sense that this might something something person becomes effective and then lots of impact.

Now it could interact with Goodharting in a case where, for example, community organizers get funds and status primarily based on numbers of people attending events, when what actually matters is finding the right people, and having the right sorts of events.

timunderwood Jun 6, 2022, 1:01 PM
−9 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Arguments for Why Preventing Human Extinction is Wrong
We just have our own values. There isn’t some magic god thingie in the sky telling us what we should value. There also isn’t some sort logical basis that describes the one true morality. Morality only exists as a matter of conscious beings, their thoughts, and their feelings.

So really: I do not care in the slightest if you can come up with a great argument for human extinction.
If that is what the greatest good is, I will try to kill and destroy those who pursue the ‘greatest good’. I value my family, I value my own life. I value the existence of beings like me extended as far and as widely as I possibly can, and I will try to fight anyone who does anything that might endanger that—and trying to even contemplate this question strikes me as the sort of thing that falls so far out of my Overton window, that the only excuse for not censoring it is that censorship doesn’t work.