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4Khorton21h Who should pay the cost of Googling studies on the EA Forum?
1. Many EA Forum posts have minimal engagement with relevant academic
literature
2. If you see a Forum post that doesn't engage with literature you think is
relevant, you could make a claim without looking up a citation based on your
memory, but there's a reasonable chance you'll be wrong.
3. Many people say they'd rather see an imperfect post or comment than not have
it at all.
4. But people tend to remember an original claim, even if it's later debunked.
5. Maybe the best option is to phrase my comment as a question: "Have you
looked at the literature on X?"
Monday, January 20th 2020Mon, Jan 20th 2020
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Friday, January 17th 2020Fri, Jan 17th 2020
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94d I find the unilateralist’s curse
[https://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/unilateralist.pdf] a particularly valuable
concept to think about. However, I now worry that “unilateralist” is an easy
label to tack on, and whether a particular action is unilateralist or not is
susceptible to small changes in framing.
Consider the following hypothetical situations:
1. Company policy vs. team discretion
2. Alice is a researcher in a team of scientists at a large biomedical company.
While working on the development of an HIV vaccine, the team accidentally
created an air-transmissible variant of HIV. The scientists must decide
whether to publish their discovery with the rest of the company, knowing
that leaks may exist, and the knowledge may be used to create a devastating
biological weapon, but also that it could help those who hope to develop
defenses against such weapons, including other teams within the same
company. Most of the team thinks they should keep it quiet, but company
policy is strict that such information must be shared with the rest of the
company to maintain the culture of open collaboration. Alice thinks the rest
of the team should either share this information or quit. Eventually, she
tells her skip manager her concerns, who relayed it to the rest of the
company in a company-open document. Alice does not know if this information
ever leaked past the company.
3. Stan and the bomb
4. Stan is an officer in charge of overseeing a new early warning system
intended to detect (nuclear) intercontinental ballistic missiles from an
enemy country. A warning system appeared to have detected five missiles
heading towards his homeland, quickly going through 30 early layers of
verification. Stan suspects this is a false alarm, but is not sure. Military
instructions are clear that such warnings must immediately be relayed
upwards.Stan decided not to relay the message to his superiors, on the
g
44d Philosophers and economists seem to disagree about the marginalist/arbitrage
argument
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/economics-econometrics-and-finance/social-discount-rate]
that a social discount rate should equal (or at least be majorly influenced by)
the marginal social opportunity cost of capital. I wonder if there's any
discussion of this topic in the context of negative interest rates. For example,
would defenders of that argument accept that, as those opportunity costs
decline, so should the SDR?
Thursday, January 16th 2020Thu, Jan 16th 2020
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Wednesday, January 15th 2020Wed, Jan 15th 2020
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26d So, I saw Vox's article on how air filters create huge educational gains
[https://www.vox.com/2020/1/8/21051869/indoor-air-pollution-student-achievement]
; I'm particularly surprised that indoor air quality (actually, indoor
environmental conditions) is kinda neglected everywhere (except, maybe, in
dagerous jobs). But then I saw this (convincing) critique
[https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/01/09/no-i-dont-think-that-this-study-offers-good-evidence-that-installing-air-filters-in-classrooms-has-surprisingly-large-educational-benefits/]
of the underlying paper.
It seems to me that this is a suitable case for a blind RCT: you could install
fake air filters in order to control for placebo effects, etc. But then I
googled a little bit... and I haven't found significant studies using blind RCTs
in social sciences and similar cases. I wonder why; at least for these cases, it
doesn't seem more unethical or harder to do it than in medical trials.
Tuesday, January 14th 2020Tue, Jan 14th 2020
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97d I'm 60% sure that LessWrong people use the term "Moloch" in almost exactly the
same way as social justice people use the term "kyriarchy" (or "capitalist
cis-hetero patriarchy").
I might program my browser to replace "Moloch" with "kyriarchy". Might make
Christian Twitter confusing though.
57d There are some pretty good reasons to keep your identity small.
http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
[http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html]
But I see people using that as an excuse to not identify as... anything. As in,
they avoid affiliating themselves with any social movements, sports teams,
schools, nation-states, professions, etc.
It can be annoying and confusing when you ask someone "are you an EA?" or "are
you a Christian?" or "are you British?" and they won't give you a straight
answer. It's partly annoying because I'm very rationally trying to make some
shortcut assumptions about them (if they're an EA, they've probably heard of
malaria) and they're preventing me from doing that.
But I also sometimes get the sense that they're trying to protect themselves by
not affiliating with a movement, and I find that a bit annoying. I feel like
they're a free rider.
What are they trying to protect themselves from? Effectively they're protecting
their reputation. This could be from an existing negative legacy of the group.
eg If they don't identify as British (even though they're a British citizen)
maybe they can dodge questions about the ongoing negative effects of the British
empire. They could also be hedging against future negative reputation eg If I
call myself an EA but then someone attempts a military coup in the name of EA, I
would look bad. By avoiding declaring yourself a group member, you can sometimes
avoid your reputation sinking when your chosen group makes bad choices.
Unfortunately, that means that those of us with our reputations on the line are
the ones who have the most skin in the game to keep people from doing stupid
unilateralist things that make everyone in the community look bad.
I would prefer it if people would take that big scary step of saying they're an
EA or Christian or Brit or whatever, and then put in the work to improve your
community's reputation. Obviously open to hearing reasons why people shouldn't
identify as members o
Monday, January 13th 2020Mon, Jan 13th 2020
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78d Basic Research vs Applied Research
1. If we are at the Hinge of History, it is less reasonable to focus on
long-term knowledge building via basic research, and vice versa.
2. If we have identified the most promising causes well, then targeted applied
research is promising.