On advice of Manifold I read Quintin’s entry and wrote up a response on LessWrong. I would be curious to hear from OpenPhil and others if and how they found this useful at all. Unless I get unexpectedly good feedback on that, I do not anticipate engaging with the other four.
Zvi
Karma: 612
Book Review: Going Infinite
It did not occur to me to enter the rebuttal into the contest, I doubt anyone else entered one either. In hindsight, given the original entry won, I regret not doing so.
Congratulations to the winners.
My question is, now that we have winners, how do we make the best use of this opportunity? What further actions would help people think better about such questions, either those at OP or otherwise?
This is complicated by the caveats. We don’t know which of the points made are the ones the judges found to be interesting or useful, or which ones merely crystalized disagreements, and which ones were mostly rejected.
As is, my expectation is that the authors (of both the winners and other entries) put a lot of effort into this, and the judges a lot of effort into evaluations, and almost no one will know what to do with all of that and the opportunity will by default be wasted.
So if there’s opportunity here, what is it? For me, or for others?
As another commentor notes, at the time I offered a rebuttal to the interest rates post, that I would still stand by almost verbatim, and I’m confused why this post was still judged so highly—or what we should be paying attention to there, beyond the one line ‘the market’s interest rates do not reflect the possibility of transformative AI.’
I will refrain from commenting on the others since I haven’t given them a proper reading yet (or if I did, I don’t remember it).
As a potential experiment/aid here, I created Manifold markets (1,2,3,4,5,6) on whether my review of these six would be retrospectively considered by me a good use of time.
I continue to not have a good solution for this. I give full permission for anyone who wants to go to the trouble of creating text-quote-included versions of any of my posts.
Sadly, FTX
From an upcoming post I am drafting: I would point out that ’heroes put the entire group, many innocent people, ‘the city,’ planet Earth or even the whole damn universe or multiverse in grave danger to save any main character or other thing that We Cannot Bear To Lose, because That’s What Heroes Do’ is ubiquitous in our fantasy media. It might be a majority of DC comics plots. Villains invoke it because decision theory, they know it will work, and even without that it is rather mind-bogglingly awful. That kind of thinking needs to be widely condemned and fall in status at least via What The Hell Hero moments, and I worry it has more influence in these situations than we think.
I am glad to hear your first two points. They do not match my experience. The third is less divergent, but also good news on the margin.
I think it is good practice to note strong disagreements where they exist, but also if I explained every strong disagreement I had I’d never finish the post, and also that would become the topic of discussion (as it partly is now) - I thought this was the right balance. I find your guess as to the reason interesting, as it is the ‘most paradigm affirming’ of the plausible strong disagreements, where it would be the right approach except there are psychological problems (which the paradigm acknowledges in general). I do think that’s a problem, but centrally that’s not it. The problem is closer to what Byrnes is talking about, that competition and preferentially wanting things locally are features rather than bugs, which includes but is broader than markets because the claim of full selflessness goes beyond not wanting to use markets.
I notice I have in the past made an attempt to write the post for that, but that my understandings and writing skills have expanded and my quick skim of it made me think it’s not as good as it could have been. But it’s what is available.
As for the part where I say I’m not allowed to say things, I am saying primarily not that the EA community in particular would be unwelcoming but that there are things that you can get cancelled or otherwise severely punished for saying on the internet, and I’m sure as hell not going to say them on the internet.
Also happy for mods to edit the post to fix it, if I can’t find an easy fix. EDIT: Should be fixed now via manually re-inserting the block quotes. I edited this in Substack first, then Google Docs to allow comments, then pasted it back in, if anyone is trying to fix compatibility.
Criticism of EA Criticism Contest
When Giving People Money Doesn’t Help
Transcript of Twitter Discussion on EA from June 2022
As someone who attempted to found a potentially multi-billion dollar company that did not succeed (MetaMed) and who has also made a few other attempts with mixed success, I can strongly confirm:
Starting companies is the highest EV play available in terms of money and also direct impact.
The odds are stacked against you and you probably fail outright not only fail to make billions, but that’s fine.
You learn and skill up a ton even in failure, on real attempts, and make good connections.
Even in moderate success you still can do way better than working for a living.
However, it requires a ton of commitment of time and energy and will, far beyond normal working for a living, and if you don’t go all-in in that sense your chances are way worse. And it’s totally stressful and exhausting and stuff like that especially as CEO. This isn’t a free action.
Also the whole process has a very high probability of corrupting someone’s epistemics and values, so you
As a former professional I can confirm that these opportunities are mostly real and worth taking advantage of if you are confident you will never want to engage in serious sports betting (if you are going to be serious you want to ensure you are using a friendly person’s referral code if possible, so you collect their affiliate payments at least in part, which could be worth more than the bonuses).
Also, you can simply use pinnaclesports.com as a reference ‘fair price’ for all wagers, and assume the middle of their market is the true odds of everything, and you won’t be that wrong.
Echoing others that there’s already a bunch of conversation on LW, so that’s probably going to be the primary comment thread. I’ll still try to check back periodically to see if there’s anything distinct here.
I notice that the entire post and discussion measure impact on EA from FTX in terms of potential damage to EA brand, or EA money raised or members or activity?
So I wanted to flag that one would also want to ask if there was impact on EA in terms of it updating and changing in various ways. Do people feel there were such changes? If so, what were they?