xccf

Karma: 904

xccf 4 Oct 2021 9:23 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelA🔸’s comment on: Independent impressions
Good points.

We should try to track the uncertainty in our all-things-considered beliefs, and we should take a portfolio approach.

It’s not enough to just track the uncertainty, you also have to have visibility into current resource allocation. The “defer if there’s an incentive to do so” idea helps here, because if there’s an incentive, that suggests someone with such visibility thinks there is an under-allocation.

xccf 28 Sep 2021 1:56 UTC
34 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Independent impressions
And this all-things-considered belief is what guides my research and career decisions.

A few arguments for letting your independent impression guide your research and career decisions instead:
- If everyone in EA follows the strategy of letting their independent impression guide their research and career decisions, our distribution of research and career decisions will look like the aggregate of everyone’s independent impressions, which is a decent first approximation for what our all-things-considered belief should be as a community. By contrast, if everyone acts based on a similar all-things-considered belief, we could overweight the modal scenario.
- You have more detailed knowledge of your independent impression than your all-things-considered belief. If you act on your all-things-considered belief, you might take some action and then later talk to a person you were deferring to in taking that action, and realize that a better understanding of their view actually implies that the action you took wasn’t particularly helpful.
- Working based on your independent impression could also be a comparative advantage if it feels more motivating since your path to impact seems more intuitively plausible.
IMO, good rules of thumb are:
- Carefully consider other peoples’ beliefs, but don’t update too much on them if you don’t find the arguments for them persuasive. (There’s a big difference between “people are unconcerned about unrecoverable dystopia because of a specific persuasive argument I haven’t heard yet” and “people are unconcerned about unrecoverable dystopia because they haven’t thought about it much and it doesn’t seem like a fashionable thing to be concerned about”.)
- Defer to your all-things-considered belief in research/career decisions if there’s an incentive to do so (e.g. if you can get a job working on the fashionable thing, but not the thing you independently think is most helpful).

xccf 23 Sep 2021 6:09 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jonas V’s comment on: What we learned from a year incubating longtermist entrepreneurship
I think offering funding & advice causes more people to work with you, and the closer they are working with you, the larger the influence your opinion is likely to have on the question of whether they should shut down their project.

xccf 23 Jun 2021 6:43 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: You can now apply to EA Funds anytime! (LTFF & EAIF only)

I don’t think risk goes up linearly with time. Many people quit their PhDs when they aren’t a good fit.

Fair enough.

Maybe a pragmatic solution here is to emphasize to people who get a grant to do independent research that they can quit and give back the remainder of their grant at any time?

xccf 21 Jun 2021 22:17 UTC
−4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: You can now apply to EA Funds anytime! (LTFF & EAIF only)
Sure. Well when the LTFF funds graduate students who aren’t even directly focused on improving the long-term future, just to help them advance their careers, I think that sends a strong signal that the LTFF thinks grad school should be the default path. Counterfactually, if grad school is 5-10x the risk of independent research, it seems like you should be 5-10x as hesitant to fund grad students compared to independent researchers. (Assuming for the moment that paternalism is in fact the correct orientation for a grantmaker to have.)

xccf 19 Jun 2021 18:32 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jonas V’s comment on: You can now apply to EA Funds anytime! (LTFF & EAIF only)
My model for why there’s a big discrepancy between what NIH grantmakers will fund and what Fast Grants recipients want to do is that NIH grantmakers adopt a sort of conservative, paternalistic attitude. I don’t think this is unique to NIH grantmakers. For example, in your comment you wrote:

we want to avoid funding people for independent research when they might do much better in an organization

The person who applies for a grant knows a lot more about their situation than the grantmaker does: their personal psychology, the nature of their research interests, their fit for various organizations. They seem a lot better equipped to make career decisions for themselves than busy grantmakers.

It seems worth considering the possibility that there are psychological dynamics to grantmaking that are inherent in the nature of the activity. Maybe the NIH has just had more time to slide down this slope than EA Funds has.

xccf 19 Jun 2021 18:22 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: You can now apply to EA Funds anytime! (LTFF & EAIF only)
The feedback loops in grantmaking aren’t great. There’s a tendency for everyone to assume that because you control so much money, you must know what you’re doing. (I talked to an ex-grantmaker who said that even after noticing and articulating this tendency, he continued to see it operating in himself.) And people who want to get a grant will be extra deferential:

once you become a philanthropist, you never again tell a bad joke… everyone wants to be on your good side. And I think that can be a very toxic environment…

source

So I think it’s important to be extra self-skeptical if you’re working as a grantmaker.

xccf 19 Jun 2021 18:13 UTC
−3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: You can now apply to EA Funds anytime! (LTFF & EAIF only)
I think you’re splitting hairs here—my point is that your “hesitation” doesn’t really seem to be justified by the data.

trying to pursue an independent research path will be a really big waste of human capital, and potentially cause some pretty bad experiences

I think this is even more true for graduate school:
- https://www.benkuhn.net/grad/
- https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bolotnyy/files/bbb_mentalhealth_paper.pdf
Independent research seems superior to graduate school for multiple reasons, but one factor is that the time commitment is much lower.

In my opinion it’s not enough to carefully think through independent research grants… with so much longtermist funding centralized through your organization, you also have to carefully think through a default of funneling people through another thing that can waste a lot of human capital and cause a lot of bad experiences, but lasts 5-10x longer.

xccf 18 Jun 2021 15:57 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: You can now apply to EA Funds anytime! (LTFF & EAIF only)

It’s hard to find great grants

Pardon me if this is overly pedantic, but I think you might be missing a map/territory distinction here. “It’s hard to find great grants” seems different than “It’s hard to find grants we really like”. For example, the LTFF managers mentioned multiple times in this post that they’re skeptical of funding independent researchers, but this analyst found (based on a limited sample size) that independent researchers outperformed organizations among LTFF grant recipients. Similarly, a poll of Fast Grants recipients found that almost 80% would make major changes to their research program if funders relaxed constraints on what their grants could be used for, suggesting that the preferences of grantmakers can diverge wildly from the preferences of researchers applying for grants.

xccf 15 Apr 2021 9:47 UTC
−3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: abergal’s comment on: The Long-Term Future Fund has room for more funding, right now
Sure. I guess I don’t have a lot of faith in your team’s ability to do this, since you/people you are funding are already saying things that seem amateurish to me. But I’m not sure that is a big deal.

xccf 8 Apr 2021 16:16 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Status update: Getting money out of politics and into charity

Perhaps the biggest area of agreement was that one hurdle we would face is getting voters to trust us—not just that it was a good idea to give money to our platform, but that we wouldn’t steal their money. This requires getting some high-profile backing (from both parties).

Is there any way to create legal infrastructure so that voters could sue if you didn’t follow through on your promises? And so that your finances are transparent? Perhaps the legal concept of “escrow” could be useful?

xccf 8 Apr 2021 11:28 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: abergal’s comment on: The Long-Term Future Fund has room for more funding, right now

I’m not in favor of funding exclusively based on talent, because I think a lot of the impact of our grants is in how they affect the surrounding field, and low-quality work dilutes the quality of those fields and attracts other low-quality work.

Let’s compare the situation of the Long-Term Future Fund evaluating the quality of a grant proposal to that of the academic community evaluating the quality of a published paper. Compared to the LTFF evaluating a grant proposal, the academic community evaluating the quality of a published paper has big advantages: The work is being evaluated retrospectively instead of prospectively (i.e. it actually exists, it is not just a hypothetical project). The academic community has more time and more eyeballs. The academic community has people who are very senior in their field, and your team is relatively junior—plus, “longtermism” is a huge area that’s really hard to be an expert in all of.

Even so, the academic community doesn’t seem very good at their task. “Sleeping beauty” papers, whose quality is only recognized long after publication, seem common. Breakthroughs are denounced by scientists, or simply underappreciated, at first (often ‘correctly’ due to being less fleshed out than existing theories). This paper contains a list of 34 examples of Nobel Prize-winning work being rejected by peer review. “Science advances one funeral at a time”, they say.

Problems compound when the question of first-order quality is replaced by the question of what others will consider to be high quality. You’re funding researchers to do work that you consider to be work that others will consider to be good—based on relatively superficial assessments due to time limitations, it sounds like.

Seems like a recipe for herd behavior. But breakthroughs come from mavericks. This funding strategy could have a negative effect by stifling innovation (filtering out contrarian thinking and contrarian researchers from the field).

Keep longtermism weird?

(I’m also a little skeptical of your “low-quality work dilutes the quality of those fields and attracts other low-quality work” fear—since high citation count is often thought of as an ipso facto measure of quality in academia, it would seem that if work attracts additional related work, it is probably not low quality. I think the most likely fate of low-quality work is to be forgotten. If people are too credulous of work which is actually low-quality, it’s unclear to me why the fund managers would be immune to this, and having more contrarians seems like the best solution to me. The general approach of “fund many perspectives and let them determine what constitutes quality through discussion” has the advantage of offloading work from the LTFF team.)

xccf 1 Apr 2021 4:42 UTC
11 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: RyanCarey’s Shortform
I thought this Astral Codex Ten post, explaining how the GOP could benefit from integrating some EA-aligned ideas like prediction markets into its platform, was really interesting. Karl Rove retweeted it here. I don’t know how well an anti-classism message would align with EA in its current form though, if Habryka is right that EA is currently “too prestige-seeking”.

xccf 30 Mar 2021 9:13 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: abergal’s comment on: The Long-Term Future Fund has room for more funding, right now

there are probably lots of people who could be doing useful direct work, but they would require resources and direction that we as a community don’t have the capacity for.

I imagine this could be one of the highest-leverage places to apply additional resources and direction though. People who are applying for funding for independent projects are people who desire to operate autonomously and execute on their own vision. So I imagine they’d require much less direction than marginal employees at an EA organization, for instance.

I also think there’s an epistemic humility angle here. It’s very likely that the longtermist movement as it currently exists is missing important perspectives. To some degree, as a funder, you are diffing your perspective against that of applicants and rejecting applicants whose projects make sense according to their perspective and not yours. It seems easy for this to result in the longtermist movement developing more homogenous perspectives over time, as people Goodhart on whatever metrics are related to getting funding/career advancement. I’m actually not convinced that direction is a good thing! I personally would be more inclined to fund anyone who meets a particular talent bar. That also makes your job easier because you can focus on just the person/people and worry less about their project.

we do offer to give people one-off feedback on their applications.

Huh. I understood your rejection email says the fund was unable to provide further feedback due to high volume of applications.

xccf 30 Mar 2021 6:27 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: abergal’s comment on: The Long-Term Future Fund has room for more funding, right now
I see. That suggests you think the LTFF would have much more room for funding with some not-super-large changes to your processes, such as encouraging applicants to submit multiple project proposals, or doing calls with applicants to talk about other projects they could do, or modifications to their original proposal which would make it more appealing to you.

xccf 30 Mar 2021 3:07 UTC
17 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Long-Term Future Fund has room for more funding, right now

We received 129 applications this round, desk rejected 33 of them, and are evaluating the remaining 96. Looking at our preliminary evaluations, I’d guess we’ll fund 20 − 30 of these.

I keep hearing that there is “plenty of money for AI safety” and things like that. But by the reversal test, don’t these numbers imply you think that most LTFF applicants could do more good earning to give? (Assuming they can make at least the hourly wage they requested on their application in the private sector.)

If they request a grant with a wage of $X/hr, and you reject their proposal, that implies you think the value of the work they are doing is less than $X (since you are unwilling to purchase it at that price), so they would be better off spending a marginal hour to earn $X for the fund instead of putting a marginal hour into direct work.

Your post talks about “room for more funding” in reference to your previous standards for funding, but I think this might be a better way to think about it—if you would be sad to see an applicant give up on direct work and switch to earning to give after LTFF rejects them, I think you still have room for more funding. (This is ~80% of applicants who are getting rejected here—what message should they take away from a rejection? I realize that “give up on direct work” is probably an incredibly demoralizing message for those 80%, I’m just not sure why the above argument is incorrect.)

xccf 20 Mar 2021 9:05 UTC
69 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Dale’s comment on: Please stand with the Asian diaspora

However, I’m not sure in practice there is very much we can directly do about the issue.

Maybe it’s worth pointing out that the OP doesn’t ask us to do anything other than “stand with the Asian diaspora”, which doesn’t seem very hard. (I’m reminded of that relationship cliche where one partner tells the other partner about a problem they have, and their partner responds by trying to solve the problem, when all that was really desired was a sympathetic ear.)

I stand with the Asian diaspora. Even if the shooting was not motivated by anti-Asian prejudice, it was still wrong. I’m not Asian, but I’ve had many Asian friends and colleagues over the course of my life, people I respect and care about. I hope they and everyone else in the diaspora are able to pull through this.
What links here?
- anonymous_ea's comment on Please stand with the Asian diaspora by Eevee🔹 (21 Mar 2021 3:14 UTC; 2 points)

xccf 18 Mar 2021 13:21 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Politics is far too meta
Well put. Sadly, the horse race/popularity contest is more dramatic, more interesting, and easier to follow than important policy details. And the more polarized our discussion becomes, the easier it is to rationalize a focus on “making sure the good guys win” over figuring out policy details which might change our view regarding what it is good to do, or even who the good guys are.

In terms of concrete solutions, I wonder if the best approach is satirizing excessive meta-ness. (One possible example of how this might be done: “How will voters react to Clinton campaign messaging in response to Trump’s tweet about the New York Times’ take on how voters are reacting to the latest Clinton email bombshell? Tune in now to find out, it’s important!” Another possible example.) It’s a rather cynical solution, essentially giving in and saying that a well thought out argument like the one you wrote here isn’t memetically fit enough to change behavior substantially amongst the pundit class. But I have a feeling that skewering meta by dialing it up to 11 could be quite effective if done by someone wittier than I am. (It’s possible I’ve been reading Twitter too much lately...)

xccf 18 Mar 2021 13:06 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Articles are invitations
In my experience, when I Facebook message or email EAs I have met in person, bringing up conversation topics I think are substantially higher value than the median topic we would probably wander into during casual chitchat at a party, my message is ignored a large fraction of the time. I don’t think this is specific to EAs, I think people are just really flakey when it comes to responding to messages. But it is demoralizing and IMO it destroys a lot of the value of the EA network.

I guess what I’m saying is, maybe keep your expectations low for sending people cold emails and cold messages...

And err on the side of responding to messages that people do send you. It’s quick & easy to reply and say something like “Sorry, I’m not interested”, which increases the probability that the person will send you another message later that you are interested in later (as opposed to deciding that “it would be awkward/humiliating to message Person X again since they ignored my last message, so I will refrain from doing so even though this new message might be really important for them to read.”)

xccf 25 Feb 2021 12:04 UTC
20 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Google’s ethics is alarming
I feel very conflicted about this.
On the one hand, we don’t want researchers at Google to feel any reluctance to blow the whistle on ethical issues with Google’s AI algorithms.
On the other hand, I’m not convinced that the original founders of the AI ethics group were the right people for the job—you mentioned radicalization; one of them responded with “You can go fuck yourself” when asked a question about the ethics of political violence. The new ethics head says “what I’d like to do is have people have [the conversation about AI ethics] in a more diplomatic way”, which seems like a good thing. I’m not optimistic about a future where the ethics of our AIs are determined by whoever yells the loudest on social media, but currently the ethics discussion in the ML community seems very heated.