You should've just said something like
I accept that as weak evidence against a Leviathan-shaped hole existing
,
Seeing as I find veterans insufferably obnoxious this isn't a surprise to me.
Those kinds of quips don't result in any Mod response and can net you quite a few upvotes! :D
KnotGodel
4mo ago
I wonder if the well funded caravans of migrants we see in some areas of the world have to some extend to do with funding related to EA.
I wonder if your wondering is done in good faith 🤔
Then there is Open A.I. and Chat GPT and effective altruists have been influential in Open A.I. Chat GPT has liberal bias. https://www.foxnews.com/media/chatgpt-faces-mounting-accusations-woke-liberal-bias
I think extremely few people (maybe even no one) pursue making LLMs liberally biased for EA reasons.
Climate change and veganism are two issues that could well lead to hardcore authoritarian policies and restrictions.
Since when has a group representing 3% of the population (vegans) taken enough power to implement "hardcore authoritarian policies and restrictions"?
Like with all identity movements, to elevate one group such as animals you end up reducing the position of another group, such as humans
Only for unhealthy minds, I think? Whether freeing slaves "reduced" the position of non-slaves is a question without an objective answer - only psychological interpretations. For instance, many Indians never eat meat and would tell you they don't feel "reduced" by this.
It does seem that at least a few of the people involved with effective altruism think that it fell victim to its coastal college demographics
That post is just describing regression to the mean, which every informal group encounters. Nothing unique to EA here.
My other conclusion related to the open A.I. incident as well is that the idea of these people that they are those who will put humanity first will lead to them ousting others and attempt to grab more power in the future too. When they do so, will they ever abandon it?
The same could be asked about any group with any large goal: companies, nonprofits, religious organizations. Nothing unique to EA here.
That this action is dishonorable matters
How do we know it is dishonorable?
This means that Sam Altman won't be the first.
won't be the last?
It also means that we got a movement very susceptible to the same problems of authoritarian far left movements in general of extreme self confidence to their own vision and will to power.
Do you have evidence EAs suffer from "extreme self confidence"?
This... encourages the power hungry to be part of it as well.
Again, this isn't unique to EA. Any group with money/power attracts the power hungry. What's your point?
I just pointed out how important the distinction is between fist fights and unprovoked assaults.
Consider my previous comment as applying entirely to unprovoked assaults as well.
I just pointed out how important the distinction is between fist fights and unprovoked assaults. A world with fewer fist fights sounds nice to me, but to each their own.
Please don't imply I prefer a world with more fist fights, when I obviously don't.
A world with fewer unprovoked assaults, though, is one I'd really like to live in, even if that means I never get to blindside someone myself. Wouldn't you agree?
Sure? Though obviously the cost of achieving that world is important to consider.
Wouldn't "I can never safely give someone a black eye out of the blue" be a price so small that it's worth paying for even a slightly reduced risk of being punched and possibly even killed out of the blue?
Sure? Alas, that's not what we're considering.
Everything I'm reading about this case makes it sound like...
Good on you for being open minded. I personally don't really care about the specifics of a random particular case.
You're also ignoring the distinction between different dead bodies. Why?
Because when we're weighing pros and cons and you discussion partner ignores a 2-3 OOM factor, perseverating on a dramatically less important factor is not helpful.
If someone invents the "murder a little child" button, a magic device which can only be used once and has a fifty-fifty chance of working, would you kill them if that was the only way to stop them from pressing it?
To answer your question, I'm unsure if I would kill the button-pushing sociopath, but note that advocating killing him merely means accept a 2x decreased value of his life. Still far and away from the 2-3 OOM factor I've been harping on.
Moreover, in the minds of most people, 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. That's an enormous jump so, no, we have not "solved the problem" with your thought experiment - you've simply replaced the hard problem (is it acceptable to shoot drunks who punch people) with an easy problem (is it acceptable to shoot sociopaths who push magic buttons that kill people), all while refusing to actually grapple with the fact that you advocate cutting 10 years of life from someone in expectation because of one dumb drunk decision at a bar.
So, must we still treat attackers equally to victims?
No? You seem to think I am a blind utilitarian calculator. I'm not. But when utilitarianism says the costs outweigh the benefits by 10ish QALYs to ~0 QALYs and the benefit is a sense of fairness/justice in a brawl in a bar some random night... well, that seems like a pretty easy question for me to answer.
It seems silly to discount someone's life by 100x merely because the threw an unprovoked fist some night. It seems silly to think such a policy change would reduce fist fights by 2-3 OOM. It seems silly that fairness in a bar fight weighs more than 10 years of human life.
Wrong.
I’m saying OP’s method of evaluating complaints is shit.
My point is that this method of reasoning is garbage that only seems useful when you are mind killed.
The specifics hardly matter.
KnotGodel
11mo ago
It's right at the top of the page:
Ahh, it's in each Culture War Post, not the rules page or side bar.
You don't like that I didn't mod a comment you think is bad. Duly noted.
I don' think that's a fair summary, but it's evident I'm annoying you and nothing will change, so I will continue to find little value here, because civil, thoughtful truth-seeking isn't really the goal of this forum. C'est la vie.
KnotGodel
11mo ago
You can't expect absolute neutrality from people at all times
I don't. I expect people to follow the rules such as
-
Be Kind
-
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
-
Be charitable.
-
Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is
-
Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
The comment I was responding to violates these. The great grand parent violates these:
Noone needs to face anything, just increasingly automate weapon systems and let the peasants die. If they're not needed and can't use violence to effectively overthrow the system then why would anyone need to pay any attention to them whatsoever?
The forum is replete with obvious violations of the rules. The mods obviously won't mod comments like this, because then they'd be modding like 30% of all the comments here.
But that doesn't mean you should feel discouraged from commenting if you dissent from the consensus view.
Why not? I have better places to discuss topics like this where. I wish this place were better, because then I'd find much more value out of discussing things here, but c'est la vie. [edit: for instance, I found the /r/slatestarcodex threads much more pleasant and insightful]
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?
Let me make this very concrete for you
- Everyone complains about things holding them back that aren't there fault.
- It is common practice for this to be a social endeavor, and for people to avoid voicing disagreement, because that is considered anti-social, since people playing the game Poor Old Me generally don't want to play the game everyone here is addicted to: Debate Me
- If I complain I'm not X because I'm an A, and you reply that people who are not-A are also not-X, you haven't actually provided any evidence that the causal claim I was making is false.
- Even the most successful people can correctly point to things that held them back.
In other words, if we apply the standard of discourse used by the OP, we can validly whine about anyone's whining. That standard of discourse is, in a word, shit. It only appeals to people who have been mind-killed.
The specifics about Trump absolutely don't matter. I could point to any person or demographic, and there would be things they whine about holding them back. I could make a post exactly like the OPs regardless of whether those factors had any basis in reality.
I realize this forum is mostly a place to vibe/whine.
Sorry for killing the mood /s
KnotGodel
10mo 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? ]
In your second link, I was responding to someone who was misinterpreting my point, and putting words in my mouth, which I seem to recall is itself against the rules. But whatever, I've reported similarly antagonistic comments with no mod action.
I maintain that this community is mostly rationalized as a place to "debate" and find which ideas survive, while mostly fulfilling the members' needs to vibe/whine - i.e. reinforce that they are smart and everyone else are either idiots or evil. Anyone who hinders this process of self-validation gets downvoted and/or negatively commented on.
For instance, you want to make a completely unsubstantiated partisan quip? 42 upvotes. You respond with actual statistical evidence? 1 upvote. Makes it pretty clear where the priorities of this community are.
That is to say, after many years, I've finally let go of caring about what strangers on an internet forum think about me. In the famous words of Rick Sanchez, "Your boos mean nothing, I’ve seen what makes you cheer."
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.
KnotGodel
6mo ago
I have the receipts
Those receipts almost perfectly matched the official data.
optimizing for light over not heat [is the goal]
...
It's obviously making use of cheap rhetoric and Orwell memes
Using cheap rhetoric while making no real argument is, in my mind, the almost the quintessential example of optimizing for heat over light (the anti-goal)
Hypothetical elites who consider the rest of us peasants
Re unkind: yes, and anyone who supports existing politicians. If you tell me my preferred candidate wouldn't care if millions of US citizens die, and that is a purely rhetorical move on your part, I'd call that unkind and needlessly inflammatory.
Re weakmanning: he is weakmanning the memes he's referencing, since Bruce Bueno de Mesquita almost certainly would disagree with his claims. Though, it's hard to say he's even weakmanning, when he has not actually made an argument (again lots of heat in that comment; virtually no light).
I acknowledge that "unkind" and "weakmanning" are not the best fits, but it definitely fails on
-
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
-
Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
-
Avoid low-effort participation
I know "Don't boo outgroup" isn't a rule, but imo it should be, and that comment fails that.
But, like you, I view the real problem as a heat-v-light one. Unlike you (I think?), I believe that comment offers approximately 100% heat and approximately 0% light.
Edit: It occurs to me, that perhaps I'm intuitively thinking of this as
heat / (heat + light) < threshold ==> bad
and you're thinking of it is
heat - light < threshold ==> bad
So, to my mind, a comment that makes no real contribution and has some heat, is bad. In your mind (I conjecture), a comment making no contribution is fine so long as its heat is sufficiently low.
KnotGodel
1mo ago
You can also be on the lookout for different games to play.
Do you mean leaving the company and/or deciding to put your energy into non-work things? Or something else?
leaders don't really aggregate the knowledge of their followers.
Hmm. I'm imagining something like an explicit set of users who are gatekeepers, so if I have a 10x idea, I can just convince one person to have The Powers That Be consider it? Something along those lines?
Some which could come to mind...
I think it's important to decide whether we're judging these from the insider or the outside.
If you went to work for Apple, I'm feel pretty sure you'd come away thinking it is woefully incompetent. From the outside, however, it largely appears competent. Not unlike the other FAANG companies imo. Likewise, if you actually worked as a priest in the Catholic Church in Spain in the 20th century, I'd be shocked if you felt this was what "blistering, white-hot competence" looked like. From the outside, I think EA is pretty clear amazingly competent, saving more counterfactual lives per dollar than nearly any other organization, even if you round everything hard-to-value to zero. From the inside however, ...
Re EA being less effective. Alas, it is tedious, but I fear the only way for us to reach a common understanding is point by point, starting with
The Forum
First, re moderation policy - this is something we discuss occasionally here. Blunt people think it's crazy to mod someone just because they were blunt - it drives away such people and we lose their valuable opinions! Other people think the reveres is more powerful: blunt people drive away blunt-averse people and cause the loss of their valuable opinions. I'm unfamiliar with any actual evidence on the matter.
Next, spending. The comment you link to explicitly says they would not accept 2x funding, which imo puts them heads and shoulders above the default of outside society (e.g. a team at a S&P 500 company, in the government, or at a typical nonprofit). I personally put a fair amount of weight on that kind of signal (I loved that Evidence Action closed down their bussing program for not-enough-impact reasons). I think its quite plausible that the forum's benefit of fostering an EA community creates new EAs and retains old ones to the extent that the value outweighs the $2m cost.
That being said, I think you are probably correct in your own comment in that thread in pointing out there is a margin-average distinction being elided, so the 2m probably really is too high.
That comment also links to a page on how they're trying to have impact. The task they rate as the most promising is running job ads on the forum. The second-most promising is helping recruiters find potential candidates. Those seem reasonably valuable to me, but, I'd still guess the EV is less than $2m.
That being said, there are some ameliorating factors:
- The whole analysis depends on how much you think EA is money-constrained versus talent-constrained - fwiw Scott leans more towards the latter. FWIW, this takes the cake for the biggest misconception that new-to-EA people have - that money-constraints are the primary issue.
- Building on that, the budget appears to have absolutely ballooned with the help of FTX funding. If this is true, it's unclear what exactly the counterfactual alternative was - i.e. was this money earmarked specifically for this forum? for community outreach? idk. Certainly, SBF's donations were not entirely effectiveness-driven.
Ultimately, I'm inclined to agree that $2M is too much, without having context on how the budget was determined, I'm not sure how much of a black eye this should be on EA as a whole.
Criminal Justice Reform
When I went through Open Philanthropy's database of grants a couple years ago, I felt only about half its spending would fall under conventional Effective Altruist priorities (e.g. global health, animal welfare, X-risk). That is, I've felt for a couple years that Open Philanthropy is only about half-EA, which, to be clear is still dramatically better than the typical non-profit, but I don't personally them funding a cause as equivalent to the EA community thinking the cause is effective. #NoTrueScotsman
I'm going to be honest - I do not, tonight, have the time to go through the two "alternatives" links with the thoroughness they deserve
Depends on your definition of “caring”
¯\(ツ)/¯
As an example, I have a very specific explanation of how my caring has changed. You decided to simply assert that this change doesn’t count as “not caring” to you.
I could practice some “Outside View” and wonder whether you might be right - but then I remember that the Outside View presupposes the other person is actually adding valuable information and not just trying to “win” points at my expense
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.
KnotGodel
4mo ago
What does that mean?... Please be specific.
This is exactly what I wanted him to do, but I was being snarky about it. I'd thank you for being kinder, but...
Have you heard of a guy called "Sam Bankman-Fried?" He was in the news a little bit lately.
A single guy in finance being over-confident is pretty minimal evidence that EAs as a group and as a constellation of organizations suffer from "extreme self confidence".
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
10mo 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.
Allow me to paraphrase your complaints from the other side of the aisle:
More options
Context Copy link