NunoSempere
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User ID: 1101
NunoSempere
9mo ago
Bismark Analysis has a pretty great analysis of Soros here: https://brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/the-legacy-of-george-soros-open-society, which might be of interest.
NunoSempere
9mo ago
You could also choose nuclear energy, better vaccines & pandemic prevention, better urban planning. etc. Or even in education, things like Khan Academy, Wikipedia, the Arch Wiki, edx, Stack Overflow,... provide value and make humanity more formidable. Thinking about those examples, do you still get the sense of pessimism, almost defeatism in your previous comments?
NunoSempere
9mo ago
Respectfully disagree. Though it's hard to say whether we do disagree in substance. Maybe you think that trying to be maximally ambitious is always misguided, and I'd agree that being misguided + maximally ambitious is not something to be admired? idk.
NunoSempere
9mo ago
Why are we not better, harder, faster, stronger
Now here: https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/07/19/better-harder-faster-stronger/ (on the motte here: https://www.themotte.org/post/593/why-are-we-not-harder-better). I'm curious to get your perspective.
Updating in the face of anthropic effects is possible
Now here: https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/05/11/updating-under-anthropic-effects/. Pasting the content to save you a link:
Status: Simple point worth writting up clearly.
Motivating example
You are a dinosaur astronomer about to encounter a sequence of big and small meteorites. If you see a big meteorite, you and your whole kin die. So far you have seen n small meteorites. What is your best guess as to the probability that you will next see a big meteorite?
In this example, there is an anthropic effect going on. Your attempt to estimate the frequency of big meteorites is made difficult by the fact that when you see a big meteorite, you immediately die. Or, in other words, no matter what the frequency of big meteorites is, conditional on you still being alive, you'd expect to only have seen small meteorites so far. For instance, if you had reason to believe that around 90% of meteorites are big, you'd still expect to only have seen small meteorites so far.
This makes it difficult to update in the face of historical observations.
Updating after observing latent variables
Now you go to outer space, and you observe the mechanism that is causing these meteorites. You see that they are produced by Dinosaur Extinction Simulation Society Inc., that the manual mentions that it will next produce a big asteroid and hurl it at you, and that there is a big crowd gathered to see a meteorite hit your Earth. Then your probability of getting hit rises, regardless of the historical frequency of small meteorites and the lack of any big ones.
Or conversely, you observe that most meteorites come from some cloud of debris in space that is made of small asteroids, and through observation of other solar systems you conclude that large meteorites almost never happen. And for good measure you build a giant space laser to incercept anything that comes your way. Then your probability of of getting hit with a large meteorite lowers, regardless of the anthropic effects.
The core point is that in the presence of anthropic effects, you can still reason and receive evidence about the latent variables and mechanistic factors which affect those anthropic effects.
What latent variables might look like in practice
Here are some examples of "latent variables" in the real world:
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Institutional competence
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The degree of epistemic competence and virtue which people who warn of existential risk display
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The degree of plausibility of the various steps towards existential risk
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The robustness of the preventative measures in place
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etc.
In conclusion
In conclusion, you can still update in the face of anthropic effects by observing latent variables and mechanistic effects. As a result, it's not the case that you can't have forecasting questions or bets that are informative about existential risk, because you can make those questions and bets about the latent variables and early steps in the mechanistic chance. I think that this point is both in-hindsight-obvious, and also pretty key to thinking clearly about anthropic effects.
NunoSempere
11mo ago
would pay for some of them if not for my desire to be anonymous
Happy to be paid in monero. You can reach out to me at nuno.semperelh@protonmail.com with a burner account.
My consulting rates are now here: https://nunosempere.com/consulting/. I'll put up a list of bounties in a while; if you are particularly interested, I have an RSS endpoint here: https://nunosempere.com/blog/index.rss (or you could sign up per email, if you are a wimp: https://nunosempere.com/.subscribe/)
NunoSempere
11mo ago
I'm curious which ones you (or other motte people) think would be most interesting for you in particular, rather than "useful in general".
NunoSempere
11mo ago
in defense of Marx.
I was not expecting this.
NunoSempere
11mo ago
On pruning science, or, the razor of Bayes: one of many thoughts of «what if Lesswrong weren't a LARP» the need to have a software framework, now probably LLM-powered, to excise known untruths and misstatements of fact, and in a well-weighed manner all contributions of their authors, from the graph of priors for next-iteration null hypotheses and other assumptions.
Also interesting
NunoSempere
11mo ago
Rationalist reversals: the notion of «Infohazard» is the most salient example of infohazard known, anthropic shadow as an anti-bayesian cognitive bias and reasoning yourself into a cult.
Curious about this.
NunoSempere
11mo ago
Also interested.
NunoSempere
11mo ago
It does sound interesting to me.
NunoSempere
1yr ago
Kudos.
NunoSempere
1yr ago
I don't necessarily disagree. In particular, I think that from the considerations I mention, we can conclude that the specifics of how the x-risk would develop are still up in the air, and that his is somewhat valuable info.
NunoSempere
1yr ago
Thanks, I appreciate this list!
NunoSempere
1yr ago
Yeah. To reply to the first part, my answer to that is to realize that knowledge is valuable insofar as it changes decisions, and to try to generate knowledge that changes decisions that are important. YMMV.
NunoSempere
1yr ago
virtually nobody has ever done this before
A similar proposal I've heard of is recursive prediction markets. E.g,. you hold a prediction market on what the probability another prediction market will/would assign when asked what the chance that a researcher spending a lot of time on a topic would conclude. I did some early work on this here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cLtdcxu9E4noRSons/part-1-amplifying-generalist-research-via-forecasting-models and here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FeE9nR7RPZrLtsYzD/part-2-amplifying-generalist-research-via-forecasting, and in general there is some work on this under the name "amplification".
NunoSempere
1yr ago
Neat piece, thanks for writing it.
NunoSempere
1yr ago
which means few have any idea
...which means that questions were selected for being uncertaint
I have yet to see anyone who can do it well
maybe you're not hanging out in the right places
I've been doing ok redirecting yt automatically to Invidious in my custom browser. On Firefox I'm using LibreRedirect: https://libredirect.codeberg.page/. For music I'm using yt-dlp. Not much of a plan, though.
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