KnotGodel
11mo ago
Whether the death happens to a victim or a perpetrator is not "less important". It's more important than just about everything else relevant to the situation.
You've made an assertion. Not an argument.
If I had two sons, and one son got drunk and punched someone at a bar while another got drunk and was punched by someone at a bar. I would not want to live in a world where the former was killed and the latter killed their assaulter. I'd much rather live in the alternative world where no one died. Which would you rather live in?
Also, using QALYs here at all produces bizarre results because it becomes much less bad to kill an older perpetrator than a younger one.
Again, I am not a blind utilitarian calculator. It is a model.
Tossing a punch at someone is an attempt to kill, or a reckless act that may kill, and should be treated as such
This is black-and-white thinking. There are gradations here that you are ignoring, because they are inconvenient to you. Those gradations are central to my argument, so I'm not sure how I'm supposed to respond here.
KnotGodel
11mo ago
As I see it, there are two possible explanations
Option One: He literally believes that US leaders wouldn't lift a finger if millions of their citizens were dying. This is absurd. No one not living in a cave could plausibly think that US leaders wouldn't lift a finger if millions of their citizens were dying. At the very least such a claim requires explanation/justification as per the rules:
Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
Option Two: He does not literally believe that US leaders wouldn't lift a finger if millions of their citizens were dying. In that case, the comment is much more inflammatory than necessary, again violating the rules.
KnotGodel
2mo ago
We have gotten significantly more lenient since moving off of reddit, because there is more of a worry of eroding our user base and having no replacement source
Why do you believe more moderation (relative to our reddit level) would lead to greater attrition than less moderation? It's not at all obvious to me.
My response was an attempt to give OP exactly why they asked for (steelman arguments for veganism). The “low effort” rule is intended to exclude “three word shit-posts”, which mine is definitely not.
Their responses were literally just boo-out-group and therefore almost the epitome of the “three word shit-post”. Therefore, they consisted of entirely 100% rule-breaking content.
Under your odd interpretation that relies only on length, any comment consisting of a simple clarifying question would now be allowed to be responded to with shit posts.
Edit: when some members of this forum are EAs/rationalists/veterans - that distinction is pretty narrow.
Ehh, Griggs vs. Duke Power is overrated by HBD/IQ folks. It's not like IQ tests were ubiquitous before Griggs, were they?
I think the more important problem for large companies is that the PR costs might be large and that PR costs are very salient/legible in a way that employee quality is not, at least no in the short-term (and people are hardly paragons of rationality in the long-term). Like, if you were a CEO and added IQ tests, you can be certain of a media backlash and you're also risking subsequent punishment by the board. Even if you're certain it would improve employee quality, that would (a) be hard to prove and (b) even if you could, it would take years...
Smaller firms,
- often just copy larger firms (they are often, in a sense, even more risk-averse than big firms, since all the financial risk is borned by the owner)
- often aren't super g-loaded anyway (e.g. mom-and-pop shop, contractor laying flooring, etc)
- have less principle-agent problems (arguably, IQ-esque tests are most valuable, because they partially displace hiring favoritism) - like, if I'm mostly hiring people I know and have worked with before, the additional value of an IQ test is ~0
I guess it depends what you mean by EA.
I haven't seen evidence that the core EA organizations (GiveWell, Evidence Action, 80000 hours, etc) suffer from "extreme overconfidence". As far as I can tell, all are large net-positives for the world that don't really engage in huge risk-taking behavior - if anything, I think the opposite is true (e.g. Evidence Action shutting down one of its programs, since it was less effective than others).
The median EA survey-taker donates to global health charities and not anything weird, which seems pretty much the opposite of "extreme overconfidence". You could argue the weirder causes (animal welfare, AI, etc) display "extreme overconfidence", but I think most of them would say they're donating, not because they're extremely convinced that, say, AI will destroy us all and only MIRI can stop them - I suspect most are donating, because they think there is at least a small chance (~5%) this is true and its worth taking seriously - it doesn't seem like "extreme overconfidence" is the mistake being made here. [Edit: or if there is a mistake at all; I remain agnostic]
So, I don't really see why SBF should be considered a central example of an effective altruist.
a whole mess of people falling into the exact failure mode that critics of their approach predicted
What do you mean?
KnotGodel
6mo ago
they rely on an irrational postulation that reality can be correctly modeled from the inside.
You think it is irrational to think we can model physics from the inside? What does it even mean to "seriously" doubt physics?
There is no inherent epistemic value to the rituals you list. You may as well argue scripture is holy. Either those rituals produce useful models or they don't, and loyalty to the rituals qua rituals is a completely irrational exercise.
I agree. I value things like standardized methodology, because of its pragmatic value, not it's "inherent" value (whatever that means). To wit, contrary to your claims, I do not have "unconditional faith in their foundations". I value standardized methodology, peer review, and all the rest, because I use them on a daily basis at work and such methodologies are incredibly useful for making good decisions and improving your understanding of complex systems.
Given how much economics has sucked at building any consistent predictive model of inflation as a phenomenon, I'm still puzzled as to why I should consider econometrics to be of any use to me. Whether it agrees with my profane observations or not.
You have been arguing that government measures of past inflation/unemployment are bullshit - not that academic models predicting future inflation are bullshit. Even if you proved the latter, it would have essentially no bearing on whether the former were true.
KnotGodel
6mo ago
You have no direct evidence that the BLS or BEA engage in "clear deliberate manipulation" or "cooked to hell and back by essentially every government of every State".
As far as I can tell, you seem to believe there are only two types of knowledge:
- pure subjective bullshit
- pure objective physics/math
With little appreciation for anything in between.
There is value to having documented methodology. There is value to applying statistical sampling methodology. There is value to consistent methodology over time. There is value to peer review.
There are value to all of those even when done imperfectly.
over my lying eyes
One of these days, y'all will accept that your "lying eyes" literally match the official data.
I'm well aware of those nuances (i.e. Paasche vs Laspeyres indices).
- I don't see what that has to do with your claim that housing and energy are "heavily underemphasized".
- CPI is mostly a Laspeyres index, which means it is generally biased upwards compared to other indices (i.e. GDP deflator).
Re unemployment, I'm not sure this matters much unless you can show that the definitions have been changed to benefit someone.
More generally, you're basically saying "there exist degrees of freedom in defining these metrics".
Sure.
But the distance between that and allegations of "clear deliberate manipulation" and "cooked to hell and back by essentially every government of every State" is HUGE. You haven't even begun to cross that line.
#MotteAndBailey
KnotGodel
6mo ago
Sure, but was that due to inflation? Or was it due to ~0% interest rates making borrowing more attractive? Or temporary pandemic-induced unemployment making borrowing more necessary? etc.
KnotGodel
11mo ago
If B shoots A and A is your son, your son is a murderer who was shot in self-defense.
No? He was a drunkard who punched someone and was killed. Not a murderer.
If B doesn't shoot A and B is your son, then your son is a murder victim, with some probability.
"with some probability" is don't a lot of work there.
Unless you're saying that you don't want B to shoot A because your only concern is reducing the chance of death, and it doesn't matter who started it
It matters, but not as much as my son stay alive.
Then this proves too much and implies that you oppose lethal self-defense, period. Do you?
It does matter, but not nearly as much imo as it does to you.
If a unhinged man is holding a dozen people hostage with a gun, take him out if you can. I'd support this even if there were a 1-in-13 chance the hostage-taker was my son. If a psychotic man has a knife and is charging you, and you can't get away, shoot him.
If one man sucker punches another in public, don't shoot. I'd support this even if there were a 1-in-2 chance the punched man was my son.
There are scenarios where there are degrees of uncertainty regarding the correct action - parameters that influence this include
-
who started it
-
how much effort was made to escape
-
how much each party escalated prior
-
discrepancies in overall strength of the parties
-
presence of peers
-
distance from security/police
-
etc
Status is a person's placement in a social hierarchy
I guess, among the people I spend time with (friends, family, coworkers), it does not feel to me like status is very coherent concept. Like, at work, there is a formal hierarchy whereby a manager has more power than those beneath them, but plenty of non-managers will be deferred to over managers. Moreover, who is deferred to is subject-dependent and, even there, we talk about things says more about who acts most confident and is more argumentative. None of the above is really related to how much people talk to you at lunch or who gets invited to socialize after work. So, to summarize:
- the formal status hierarchy only correlates somewhat with who is listened to most
- "how much people listen to you" is itself not terribly consistent between topics
- how much people defer to you about work isn't correlated at all with how much they want to talk to you about non-work things or socialize with outside of work
And even on that last point, much more of the variance is related to whether you display an interest in talking about non-work things or an interest in hanging out outside work.
Moreover, there are clear cliques, and I don't really get a sense that some cliques are preferable to others. Cliques are, as far as I can tell, the opposite of a status hierarchy: a group of peers socializes frequently because of idiosyncratic socializing value they provide each other (e.g. shared interest, complementary personalities, etc)
Personally, I don't really have a desire to be "popular" - I have a desire for specific people to continue liking me or, occasionally, start liking me.
Among friends and family, I'd say a "status hierarchy" is even less coherent.
I will admit that, in high school and for dating, I do think there is some coherence in a hierarchy of sorts, but I have not experienced that dynamic much outside those contexts.
Re banging your wife, we can add your peer group to the dynamic - do you think their opinion of you would change at all if I banged your wife in front of them?
I think their opinion of you and me would both change pretty drastically, though I think their opinion of you would fall far more. But I don't think "status" is the best framing of the situation. You having sex with my wife in front of them would cause them to feel incredibly awkward and (I'd hope) sorry for me. You'd associate me with negative emotions, which would make it less desirable for them to socialize with me.
But, again, I don't think any of this is zero-sum. I don't think if I went to a separate group the "low-status" would follow me. I don't think I would be significantly listened to less at work. etc.
That is, to the extent to which I have "status" (outside high school and dating) it seems to very dependent not just on me, but the the judge and also the context. I don't think the uni-dimensional model has much value to offer.
If you walked in on that what would you think my opinion of you was?
Not great? The affair would reveal you're narcissistic and think little of me.
What about your wife - if you saw that would you immediately assume she loved you as much as she did on your wedding day?
I would think she loved me less. But, I don't see that as an affront of my "status" writ large - I see it as her (a specific person) loving me less.
Edit: in case it wasn't clear, I'm interpreting the "status" theory similar to the g-factor intelligence theory: as a relatively stable common factor that explains significant variance in various other variables, which implies there should be significant covariance between
- how much Bob likes/respects you and how much Dan likes/respects you (stability over judge - i.e. "objectivity")
- how much Bob likes/respects today versus tomorrow (stability over time)
- how much Bob respects you in one context versus another (stability over domain)
I conversely believe the above are (a) not very will correlated and (b) significantly under your control (i.e. you laugh, smile, ask people genuine questions above themselves, are generous, talk to strangers, ask people to go bowling with you, etc ==> people will want to spend more time with you)
you should consider it from behind the veil of ignorance
I agree.
If Man A punched Man B and I knew one of them was my son but not which, I would pray to every god under the sun that B didn't shoot at A.
I think this crucially depends on the death rates from punching vs shoot-to-fist ratio... I don't think that guns are limited to having a 50% reduction on fistfights
Agreed, and based on the evidence this seems like a 2-3 order-of-magnitude difference, which is why I've been arguing its crazy to advocate for shooting. To argue otherwise on utilitarian grounds requires claiming that for every 1% decrease in shooting-people-who-throw-punches, the number of punches throw grows by 100-1000%, which seems patently absurd.
And we can modify the thought experiment: your extended family of ~50 people go to a bar and drink. Would you prefer they all come armed with a willingness to escalate a punch to a shot? I wouldn't. I have a hard time believing many people would.
Once someone actually cares about the people involved, it seem clear that they are much less gung-ho (pun intended).
KnotGodel
2mo ago
Past me: I got downvotes; what is wrong with my comment?
Present me: I got downvoted; what does that imply about the community doing the voting?
KnotGodel
4mo ago
Based on this comment, SBF's blog, and his professional achievements it seems pretty clear that Sam is extremely smart. Specifically, he is very good at manipulating formal systems - math, software, games, etc. He is merely smart is once you leave the world of formal systems.
Unfortunately, in a move common common among STEM-nerd, I'm guessing he realized that all non-formal-systems contain subjectivity, which means you can use them to argue anything, which means they're "bullshit". Indeed, much of this forum is built upon a similar syllogism, but with a more explicitly political lens (e.g. the law is so vague that you can prosecute anyone with selective enforcement). None of this is completely wrong and it is often useful in some contexts, however...
I strongly believe that a large part of a STEM-nerd maturing into an healthy adult is learning
- that there are degrees of subjectivity and objectivity
- that whether a system (formal or informal) is useful for navigating the world is a pretty different question than whether it is objective/true
- how to use multiple systems, both formal and informal, simultaneously to navigate the world
Or, to use Robert Kegan’s model of development: to move from Stage 4 to Stage 5.
Like, take Socrates. Is Socrates the greatest philosopher in the history? That question doesn't have an answer. However, there is value in reading Socrates that puts him above a typical philosopher - namely that understanding Socrates makes it much easier for you to understand a myriad of other philosophers. If you're interested in digesting philosophy as a field, that is valuable. If, on the other hand, you're interested in how philosophy applies to doing the greatest good for the fewest dollars - not so much.
Or take Freud. I assume SBF would say Freud was pseudoscientific bullshit. To be fair, (1) I have yet to find value in some of his writing (particularly on sexuality) and (2) Freud was hardly a beacon of science qua science, and yet... Freud
- popularized the idea that much of our cognition is not conscious
- invented "defense mechanisms" as a concept and cataloged an enormous number of them (e.g. the use of intellectualisation to avoid negative emotions)
both of which are not really "provable", but are self-evidently true/useful.
Likewise, Freud popularized the framing of the Id, Ego, and Superego, which, when stripped of its mysticism essentially boils down to:
People's want to fulfill their desires (Id, Pleasure Principle), but these often conflict with moral/social values (Superego). This conflict, in addition to some desires/values being literally impossible (Reality Principle) introduce significant "tension" in that you can't achieve everything you want, so you have to trade off some of one for the other. Moreover, people use various cognitive tricks to help reduce this tension - e.g. rationalizing that they didn't want money anyway, when their desire (to have money) conflicts with reality (they're poor) or their morals (it's wrong to be greedy).
It is literally impossible to prove the above framework is "true". However, a great number of people find the framing useful.
Anyway, I've gotten off track... ¯_(ツ)_/¯
KnotGodel
5mo ago
If they believed their altruism was ineffective they wouldn’t do it
Everyone thinks their own altruism is effective. EAs deliberately try to choose the most effective, which the vast majority of people don't consider attempting and act confused if you suggest it.
KnotGodel
11mo ago
That was the response I expected, which is why I continued with:
What if it only had a 0.1% chance of working? We're now talking about multiple orders of magnitude, right?
Which I addressed with
there's an enormous difference between someone pushing a button with a specific probability of killing someone purely for the thrill of killing someone with a magic button and a drunkard throwing a punch at someone he views as disrespecting him. So even if you believe our button-pushing sociopath's life has 0 value, I don't know why you would infer the punch-throwing drunkard's life has no value...
You ignoring me grappling with an issue ≠ me not grappling with the issue. Motes and beams, indeed.
My position is that there's a level of unjustified lethal force, perhaps on the order of p=1-in-1000 risk, such that a victim reducing even similarly minimal subsequent risk is worth perhaps a q=1-in-10 risk of lethality against the aggressor....
Yes, I understand that, and you based this on your thought experiment of a sociopath with a magic button, which I addressed and rejected (see above).
I think "some ratio exists, it might even be as high as 100, and the more avoidable the aggression is the higher the ratio should be" is a more philosophically defensible position than deleting attempts to clarify a position. Fists kill people; the idea that a gun is qualitatively rather than quantitatively different is just philosophy-via-rounding-error.
to
0 QALYs
Would you have preferred 0.1 QALYs? I admit I feel like that is quibbling. Just replace my "0" with "0.1" and literally everything I say continues to follow through. The point is that the consequences of "don't escalate to guns" are far better than "do escalate to guns". Since the consequences are enormously better (e.g. 10 years of human life), I expect an argument for why escalation is commendable (or should be legal) to offer something of similar value. This "rounding" is not central to my argument in the least.
So, how high a percentage of the time would such attacks have to kill people before you'd stop rounding to zero? Or conversely, how low a percentage of the time would the response have to be lethal before you started?
I don't have a specific numerical answer, but I don't need one, because the answer is definitely not 2-3 OOM.
but "don't suddenly attack people" seems so much easier to turn into a bright line rule than "you can attack them, a little lethally, and they can attack you, but nobody start doing it too too lethally, if you get me".
How about just "try running away before shooting"? But, I don't concede that a brighter line outweighs the expected loss of life.
"if you're going to be violently dumb when drunk, teetotal" is the dead-body-minimizing solution
Agreed, but alas the framing of this conversation isn't what to do if you are omnipotent, but what actions / laws we should advocate for.
Doesn't nearly everybody? Suppose the killer in this case had been pissed off enough to brandish and aim his gun before even being provoked by an attack? It would be self-defense to kill him first, no? Would we want to forbid that because it would be cutting off his life from one dumb drunk decision?
Again, there is a gradient here. Most things in life are on a gradient. We can't just ignore the gradient, because it makes decision-making simpler.
Ignoring all the bits here and there, let me give you my own thought experiment that I think illuminates my intuition:
Suppose you have two sons: Bob and Dan. A genie comes before you and say
Bob got drunk and punched someone; Dan got drunk and got punched. You can choose one of two futures for your sons:
(1) Bob got shot by the guy he punched. Dan shot the guy he punched.
(2) Bob did not get shot by the guy he punched. Dan did not shoot the guy he punched.
Which would you wish for? Is Dan's honor/fairness/safety-from-fists more important to you than Bob getting shot? [Edit: Which society would you want children to grow up in? ]
Assortative Mating and the Industrial Revolution: England, 1754-2021:
Abstract:
Using a new database of 1.7 million marriage records for England 1837-2021 we estimate assortment by occupational status in marriage, and the intergenerational correlation of occupational status. We find the underlying correlations of status groom-bride, and father-son, are remarkably high: 0.8 and 0.9 respectively. These correlations are unchanged 1837-2021. There is evidence this strong matching extends back to at least 1754. Even before formal education and occupations for women, grooms and brides matched tightly on educational and occupational abilities. We show further that women contributed as much as men to important child outcomes. This implies strong marital sorting substantially increased the variance of social abilities in England. Pre-industrial marital systems typically involved much less marital sorting. Thus the development of assortative marriage may play a role in the location and timing of the Industrial Revolution, through its effect on the supply of those with upper-tail abilities.
ETA: bolded the most important sentence
KnotGodel
5mo ago
some Christian charity dedicated to banning abortion is usually happy to switch method to boost efficiency
I'm not sure this is generally true. I think it's usually fairly difficult for nonprofits to admit a program is ineffective. Indeed, one of the reasons I like Evidence Action so much is that they turned down a program (busing farmers to the city during the off season so they could work) that turned out to be less effective than their other programs (deworming and chlorine in water).
But even acknowledging that non-EA nonprofits do sometimes turn down less-effective programs, my main point is that virtually zero Christians will ask themselves which non-profit will actually be most effective at banning abortion.
KnotGodel
6mo ago
You brought up your receipts contradicting the official data. They did not.
You’re interpretation of “the crux” is selective: claims about the official data being manipulated and useless were/are definitely central to both our discussion then and the surrounding discussion on this site then/now.
Trying to understand why people don't take selected macro statistics as gospel truth about their own lives is, to use a common phrase, extremely out of touch.
It depends on the purpose of the discussion.
Is it to discuss policy? Is it to discuss aggregate public perception? Averages matter.
Is it to vent? They don't.
The question to ask: why are we on this forum?
Well, the one time he provided concrete examples of runaway inflation, his "lived experience" almost perfectly matched the official data. So, there's that...
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