WilliamKiely

Karma: 1,015

WilliamKiely 30 Jul 2021 19:55 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Holden Karnofsky’s comment on: All Possible Views About Humanity’s Future Are Wild

regardless of what speed they traveled while moving between stars

Adding to my other reply to your other comment I just made, let me just clarify that the model I’m working with is the “fast colonization” model from 25:20 of this Stuart Armstrong FHI talk, in which von Nuemann probes are sent directly from their origin solar system to each other galaxy, rather than hopping from galaxy to galaxy (as in the “slow colonization” model used by Sagan/Newman/Fogg/Hanson according to Stuart’s slide).

So if >0.99c probes are possible, then I think the hypothesis I described is at least plausible, since civilizations indeed wouldn’t see other expanding civilizations until those civilizations reached them.

WilliamKiely 30 Jul 2021 19:38 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Holden Karnofsky’s comment on: All Possible Views About Humanity’s Future Are Wild
To clarify, I am pointing out that if extraterrestrials exist that are mining stars for energy and doing other large-scale things that we’d expect to be visbile from other solar systems or galaxies, and if those extraterrestrials are >X light-years away from us and only started doing those large-scale things <X years ago, then we would not expect to see them because the light from their civilization would not yet have had time to reach us.

So the speed of expansion of their civilization isn’t a necessary aspect of why we can’t see them.

However, if the nature of our universe is such that extraterrestrials are likely to have arisen elsewhere in our galaxy (meaning <100,000 ly from us), then what’s the explanation for why they arose in the last <100,000 years and not in the billions of years before that? That sould seem improbable a priori.

One (partial) explanation for that coincidence is if we hypothesize that the nature of our universe is such that any civilization that arises and reaches a point of doing large-scale things that would be visible from many light-years away also expands at near the speed of light beginning as soon as it starts having those large-scale effects. If we further assume that such expansion reaching our solar system before now would have prevented us from existing today (e.g. by extinguishing life on Earth and replacing it with something else), then this serves as a (partial) explanation for the above coincidence by introducing an observation selection effect where we only exist in the first place because no other extraterrestrials have arisen within X ly of us in the last X years.

Note that I called this (“intelligence expands at (near) light speed once it starts having effects that would be visible from light years away”) hypothesis a “partial” explanation above (for lack of a better word) to note that while it could explain why it’s not surprising that we don’t see signs of extraterrestrials mining stars (even conditional on them existing), it is also a hypothesis that we find ourselves in a very rare world (simulation possibilities aside)--one in which intelligence arose more than once in our vaccinity, but at almost exactly the same time (e.g. 13.79995 and 13.8 billion years after the big bang if some other civilization in our galaxy started expanding 50,000 years ago), which a priori is unlikely.

WilliamKiely 24 Jul 2021 0:56 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Charles_Dillon ’s comment on: Predicting Open Phil Grants
That’s a good point I didn’t consider. I think you’re right that the average question would not be very helpful, and not helpful enough to be worth adding.

WilliamKiely 23 Jul 2021 22:36 UTC
4 points
on: Narration: We are in triage every second of every day
I recall very much enjoying reading Holly’s spot-on commentary after listening to the “Playing God” Radiolab episode! It very much showcases the EA perspective. Awesome that there is now an audio version of it.

WilliamKiely 23 Jul 2021 21:25 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Taylor Swift’s “long story short” Is Actually About Effective Altruism and Longtermism (PARODY)

I feel like these are two fairly different claims.

Yes, I agree they are different. And I agree the OP’s claim is implausible for the reason you give. I just meant to point out that I think the OP misstated the claim made by the GWWC calculator cited and that the GWWC claim is plausible (or at least that your given reason is not sufficient to make it implausible).

The GWWC calculator explicitly says “If you have a household income of $58,000 (in a household of 1 adult)” “you are in the richest 1% of the global population.”

That can be true even if the median individual American is not in the top 1% of individuals by income globally, and even if the median American household is not in the top 1% of households by income globally because an individual who makes as much as the median American household actually makes more than most Americans. (We can’t estimate the exact percentile a priori. A priori they could make more than 18-100% of Americans depending on how individual Americans and income are distributed across American households.)

The GWWC calculator claim could be true only if the individual who makes as much as the median American household makes more than at least 76.3% of Americans (76.3% = 1-0.01/(333,000,000/7,881,000,000)). 76.3% is in the range that I would have guessed (~60-80%) so it’s at least plausible.

Edited to add: Wikipedia says 76% of Americans make less than $57,500/year. The existence of any number of non-Americans making more than $58,000/year is surely enough to cause the GWWC calculator’s claim to be false.

Looks like only ~5-15% of Americans are in the global 1% of the income distribution then. I’d be interested in knowing the exact number / income level.

WilliamKiely 23 Jul 2021 18:40 UTC
23 points
on: Predicting Open Phil Grants
Open Phil obviously has more information on this than members of the general public. Do we know whether Open Phil is willing to share any of its internal forecasts on this (or internal knowledge that could be used to create such forecasts) publicly?

WilliamKiely 23 Jul 2021 18:36 UTC
2 points
on: Predicting Open Phil Grants
I really like your questions! If you’re open to creating more, I’d suggest creating another (seven) question(s) on the average yearly amount of money granted from 2025-2030 (overall and for each of the six focus areas), since the yearly variance is significant.

WilliamKiely 23 Jul 2021 18:32 UTC
8 points
on: Predicting Open Phil Grants
This is great. Small point of feedback on the title: I’d prefer: “Forecasting Open Phil Grant Amounts”. (“Donations” doesn’t seem like the right word to me for large philanthropic grantmaking.)

WilliamKiely 23 Jul 2021 18:23 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Taylor Swift’s “long story short” Is Actually About Effective Altruism and Longtermism (PARODY)
An individual who makes as much as the median American household plausibly could be in the top 1% of individuals by income, if average household size is a few people. (There are only 120 million American households.) I think this is what the linked GWWC calculator is doing.

WilliamKiely 23 Jul 2021 18:19 UTC
4 points
on: Taylor Swift’s “long story short” Is Actually About Effective Altruism and Longtermism (PARODY)
Additionally, in Verse 1:

The knife cuts both ways

This could refer to how while existential risk is higher now, existential hope is higher too.

While unaligned AGI could result in existential catastrophe, aligned AGI could result in an extremely good future, in which civilization quickly reaches technological maturity and expands throughout the galaxy.

WilliamKiely 23 Jul 2021 18:14 UTC
2 points
in reply to: newptcai’s comment on: All Possible Views About Humanity’s Future Are Wild
I recommend The case for taking AI seriously as a threat to humanity by Kelsey Piper

WilliamKiely 23 Jul 2021 18:11 UTC
2 points
on: All Possible Views About Humanity’s Future Are Wild

Maybe some extraterrestrial species already effectively has spread throughout our galaxy, and for some reason we just don’t see them.

Could it be that we don’t see extraterrestrial species spread throughout our galaxy because civilizations spread at near-lightspeed?

WilliamKiely 22 Jul 2021 8:49 UTC
5 points
on: Metaculus Questions Suggest Money Will Do More Good in the Future
While my comments reveal that I disagree with the inferences you make in this post, I just want to say that I think this sort of analysis is really cool and I appreciate your thoughtfulness with coming up with these questions and writing this post. Your writings have influenced my thinking and changed my view on several occasions and I look forward to reading more of what you have to say in the future.

WilliamKiely 22 Jul 2021 8:37 UTC
1 point
on: Metaculus Questions Suggest Money Will Do More Good in the Future
I bought the Metaculus predictions (using my Tachyon points on Metaculus) for each of the two questions in your post as well as the malaria question Charles Dillon linked to.

For those unfamiliar, the Metaculus prediction has a better track record than the community prediction (public to everyone, which Michael cited in his post as what Metaculus thinks) over questions on the Metaculus site, however is not generally visible until forecasts on a question are closed.

Knowing the Metaculus predictions does not seem very insightful to me. Nevertheless, if anyone would care to know them, feel free to DM me.

WilliamKiely 22 Jul 2021 8:33 UTC
5 points
in reply to: james.lucassen’s comment on: Metaculus Questions Suggest Money Will Do More Good in the Future
(1) The Metaculus question adjusts numbers for inflation to 2015 dollars, so they wouldn’t appear explicitly in GiveWell’s spreadsheets.

(2) Note that there’s a distinction between “outcome as good as saving a life” and “cost per life saved”. The $890 number is (GiveWell’s 2016 estimate of) the former while the $3,000 - $5,000 is the latter. The former includes good done by reducing the probability that people die as well as good done by raising peoples’ incomes, which at some point is equivalently good to averting a death.

Is there some kind of up-to-date dashboard or central source for GiveWell’s main “cost-per-expected-life” figure?

Pablo’s comment here says: “As far as I can tell, the 2020 version of GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness analysis no longer employs the category of “outcome as good as saving a life”.

I haven’t been keeping up with GiveWell’s updates in the last year or two and am merely speculating, but perhaps GiveWell no longer employs the metric “outcome as good as a saving a life” (??). Hopefully someone else can answer this with confidence.

I assume your citation of GiveWell’s Top Charities page listing $3000-$5000 to save a life is the closest they have to a an up-to-date dashboard or central source number, and they’re just choosing to advertise that number (a number in terms of cost to save a life) rather than advertise a cost to produce an “outcome as good as saving a life.”

WilliamKiely 22 Jul 2021 8:13 UTC
1 point
on: Metaculus Questions Suggest Money Will Do More Good in the Future

Metaculus estimates that GiveWell’s top charity in 2031 will need to spend $430 per life saved equivalent (according to GiveWell’s own analysis).

Assuming I’m not mistaken about how Metaculus works, $430 is the median of recent forecasters’ median forecasts on this question. But don’t we really care more about the mean expected cost-effectiveness than the median? (I could be wrong about this since after all (I think) GiveWell’s estimate is the median output of their staff members’ inputs into their cost-effectiveness model.)

Metaculus doesn’t give the mean value, but looking at the shape of the probability density distribution on the Metaculus question, it looks to be roughly symmetrical about the median and given that the axis is logarithmic, I think this means the mean value is greater than the median.

So assuming the mean is what we care about, then it seems that Metaculus community prediction is greater than GiveWell’s 2019 estimate, suggesting that money (given to GiveWell charities) will do less good in the future rather than more.

WilliamKiely 22 Jul 2021 8:11 UTC
7 points
on: Metaculus Questions Suggest Money Will Do More Good in the Future

This could happen for two reasons: either the 2019 recommended charities run out of room for more funding, or GiveWell finds a charity that’s better than any of the 2019 recommendations.

I think the third reason that you mention later is more likely, namely that “Perhaps instead Metaculus expects GiveWell’s estimate is currently too pessimistic, and it will converge on the true answer by 2031.”

This seems most likely to me since my guess is that the reason why GiveWell’s estimate changed from $890 in 2016 to $436 in 2019 is because their methodology or something else changed (e.g. 2019-GiveWell thought 2016-GiveWell’s way of estimating the “cost to get an outcome as good as saving a life” over-estimated the true cost). I don’t think they actually believe the best giving opportunity was twice as cost-effective in 2019 as 2016. (I don’t actually know this for sure, so if you or someone else knows better, please correct my guess.)

This at least weakly suggests that Metaculus users expect GiveWell to improve its recommendations over time.

Does it? If “the 2019 recommended charities run out of room for more funding” this could be because e.g. governments or billionaires have stepped in to make sure that every child who needs one has a bed net and all deworming efforts have been fully funded forever. It seems to me that this would mean that the marginal philanthropist no longer has access to this low-hanging fruit. Since these opportunities would be fully-funded, GiveWell would then have to recommend the next best thing, which would be less cost-effective in expectation, not more.

WilliamKiely 22 Jul 2021 8:10 UTC
3 points
on: Metaculus Questions Suggest Money Will Do More Good in the Future

For comparison, in 2019, GiveWell estimated that its most cost-effective charity spends $592 per life saved equivalent. (These figures are adjusted for inflation.)

I think you said in 2020 the $592 number was a mistake:

Correction: I copy/pasted the cost per life saved numbers from the previous question, but the $592 number for 2019 is as of the middle of the year. The end-of-year estimate (adjusted to 2015 dollars) is $436.

$436 is a lot closer to $430 than $592.

WilliamKiely 22 Jul 2021 8:09 UTC
3 points
on: Metaculus Questions Suggest Money Will Do More Good in the Future
Meta question: Is there a reason you made this post a Question post rather than a regular post? Seems like it should be a regular post.

WilliamKiely 22 Jul 2021 0:26 UTC
3 points
in reply to: WilliamKiely’s comment on: Further thoughts on charter cities and effective altruism
I’ll opine that this reference doesn’t seem as positive as Mark had me thinking. In particular, I assumed that they would say something to support Mark’s claim that “I don’t think my estimates of growth are substantially different from the average economist” and they did not.

Additionally, I’ll note that their criticism that “charter cities are unlikely to hold the key to sustained growth in developing countries for the very good reason that the internal political compulsions the charter is intended to hold at bay often have a way of biting back” seems like a poor reason not to invest in more charter city experiments. Duflo and Bannerjee seem to be drawing this conclusion merely on Romer’s one failed experiment and it’s not at all clear from that that all charter city efforts must be doomed to fail in the same way. Even if most failed in that way, if you could setup a significant fraction of charter cities well such that a significant fraction of charter cities did generate significant growth, that would likely be very much worth doing despite not being the result 100% of the time.