I am a generalist quantitative researcher. I am open to volunteering and paid work. I welcome suggestions for posts. You can give me feedback here (anonymously or not).
Vasco Grilođ¸
Karma: 11,960
LiberÂalÂism Forever
Hi Grace. Thanks for sharing. Are you planning to rely on quantitative analysis of some sort? I would be happy to review related docs or sheets for free if useful, and I am open to performing analyses from scratch too.
Hi Leonard. Great point. I agree. I think it would be better for the focus to be on the FLOPS and moral weight per FLOPS.
I do not think a post being difficult to assess makes its existence worse than nothing (which is the bar to meet for a ban). I believe they are fine as long as they do not become too visible, and cause too many people to read it without getting value out of it. I do not see much risk of this. If a post is difficult to assess, it will have little karma, and therefore not gain much visibility.
Decreasing the assessment cost would be good, but there are a few elements already in place to achieve it. The estimated reading time, automatically generated summaries for long posts without one, disclaimer about the extent to which the post was written by AI, and karma, and number of posts and comments of the author (low karma relative to the number of posts and comments will tend to be associated with a less valuable post). If you are finding the assessmt cost too high, you might want to consider asking LLMs to go through posts for you, and just let you know about the ones which are expected to be valuable enough for you to check (based on some criteria that you describe). You can also ask for borderline cases to see if they are calibrated (the borderline cases should not be very worth checking or clearly not worth checking).
Hi Brad.
I guess I just would ask that people read stuff and evaluate it before condemning it. If something seems to be AI and you donât want to read further, fine. But going on to condemn it simply on that basis seems very wrong to me. It seems very strange that in this community I am in a small minority thinking this.
I very much agree with your view. I think posts should be assessed on their merits, and that it is better to let the karma system work instead of limiting the number of comments and posts (e.g. written by AI or new users).
Good luck, I hope you win!
Thanks. Me too. I am thinking about suggesting to Greg doing a similar bet resolving at the end of 2030, where I would initially donate to Gregâs preferred charity what I win from the 1st bet plus some more money. I could probably bet like 40 k$ in total, and then win 80 k$ adjusted for inflation or growth in stocks at the end of 2030.
Where would you now like the donation to go?
I would make a donation to Rethink Priorities (RP) restricted to research on moral weights led by Bob Fischer. Here is some context.
Hi Abraham. It looks like the 1st posts from new users are already being restricted to some extent. Michael Dickens said âSomebody has to be the one to read and upvote a new userâs post first, or else it wonât make it to the front pageâ.
I think it is better to let the karma system work instead of limiting the number of comments and posts.
Hi Michael.
Somebody has to be the one to read and upvote a new userâs post first, or else it wonât make it to the front page.
Are you implying you are often the one doing this? If so, have you considered just checking the posts on the front page? You would not lose much if you are not interested in the vast majority of the 1st posts from new users.
@Toby Tremlettđš , maybe mods could be tasked with voting on the 1st posts of new users.
Hi Chris. Interesting analysis.
Hi Ben. Thanks for sharing that.
(1) says that recursive self-improvement [RSI] has already begun
It is unclear to me what this means. Dario says âThis dynamic is called recursive self-improvement, and it is starting to happen across the industry, including at Anthropic, as we and others have describedâ. I have gone through the instances of ârecursive self-improvementâ and âRSIâ in the linked sources, and I did not find any concrete description of what it means for RSI to start. There is a sense in which humanity has always been building on past knowledge.
(2) says that rogue agents could take over âthe entire Internetâ within six to 12 months
Dario says âitâs my worry that in 6â12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrailsâ. I doubt humans will lose control over the entire internet to bots over the next 12 months. I am open to bets against short timelines for transformative AI (TAI), or what they supposedly imply, up to 10 k$.
Hi Grace. I liked the post. Do you have any thoughts on the reputional effects of my posts on soil invertebrates?
This was spurred by Manifundâs recent announcement
I assume you are referring to Caroline Ellison joining Manifund. This is the only concrete historical example you mentioned. I wonder if discussing concrete historical examples could help illustrate how you are thinking about various trade-offs. Maybe you could do this without taking a clear position on the decisions that were made (which I guess you would find reputationally risky).
Why Scams Succeed and Cures Fail: Understanding Hype vs. Value. This post is only very tangentially related to yours, but readers may find it relevant.
We aim for a 5x multiplier on the marginal growth activities we undertake (e.g., pledge booths at EAGs) as well as our average multiplier.
The marginal multiplier of the marginal growth activities should be close to 1? Spending more hours on pledge booths at EAGs would make sense if the last hour led to 5 times as much donations to cost-effective charities as it costed?
we aim to be somewhat worldview/âcause neutral
Nitpick. I understand you assume all effective donations have the same cost-effectiveness. This is more an implication of what Stefan Schubert calls cause-agnosticism (âuncertainty about how investments (direct work, donations) in different causes compare in terms of impactâ). Cause neutrality is usually used in the sense of what Sten calls cause-impartiality (âselect causes based on impartial estimates of impactâ), which is compatible with large differences in the cost-effectiveness of effective donations to different causes.
Here are thoughts from Brian Tomasik on the brainâs energy consumption per unit time as a proxy for moral weight.
Hallerâs Rule and Sentience Per Unit Biomass. Here is a related post from Brian Tomasik.
Hallerâs Rule and Sentience Per Unit Biomass. Here is a related post from Brian Tomasik.
This article suggests that the ratio of brain metabolism to total body metabolism may be roughly constant.
If so, my results would be similar assuming welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year proportional to âbrainâs BMR at 25 ÂşCâ^âexponent of the brainâs BMRâ instead of âBMR [of the body] at 25 ÂşCâ^âexponent of the BMRâ. Relatedly, here are thoughts from Brian on the brainâs energy consumption per unit time as a proxy for moral weight.
Hi Thomas. I think the risk of human extinction until 2035 is something like 10^-7.
Is ConÂsciousÂness EveryÂwhere?
The groups are defined to some extent in the footnote I mentioned. I would say it is useful to have some information about the factors affecting the income of people with more or fewer years of formal education.
Readers of this post may be interested in Brian Tomasikâs post Bacteria, Plants, and Graded Sentience.