alex lawsen (previously alexrjl)'s Quick takes

Many, perhaps most people, would be well advised to beware surprising and suspicious convergence.

The rest would be well advised to beware excessive wariness of surprising and suspicious convergence.

I'm fairly disappointed with how much discussion I've seen recently that either doesn't bother to engage with ways in which the poster might be wrong, or only engages with weak versions. It's possible that the "debate" format of the last week has made this worse, though not all of the things I've seen were directly part of that.

I think that not engaging at all, and merely presenting one side while saying that's what you're doing, seems better than presenting and responding to counterarguments (but only the weak ones), which still seems better than strawmanning arguments that someone else has presented.

Now posted as a top-level post here.

When Roodman's awesome piece on modelling the human trajectory came out, I feel like far too little attention was paid to the catastrophic effects of including finite resources in the model. 

I wonder if part of this is an (understandable) reaction to the various fairly unsophisticated anti-growth arguments which float around in environmentalist and/or anticapitalist circles. It would be a mistake to dismiss this as a concern simply because some related arguments are bad. To sustain increasing growth, our productive output per unit resource has to become arbitrarily large (unless space colonisation). It seems not only possible but somewhat likely that this "efficiency" measure will reach a cap some time before space travel meaningfully increases our available resources.

I'd like to see more sophisticated thought on this. As a (very brief) sketch of one failure mode:

- Sub AGI but still powerful AI ends up mostly automating the decision making of several alrge companies, which with their competitive advantage then obtain and use huge amounts of resources.

- They notice each other, and compete to grab those remaining resources as quickly as possible.

- Resources gone, very bad.

(This is along the same lines as "AGI acquires paperclips", it's not meant to be a fully fleshed out example, merely an illustrative story)

I'm considering taking the very +EV betting opportunities available with the US election with the money I plan to donate over the next 6 months, then donating the winnings (or not donating if I lose).

Some more discussion on my twitter here but I'm interested in thoughts from EAF members too. It's not a huge amount of money either way.

EA fellowships and summer programmes should have (possibly more competitive) "early entry" cohorts with deadlines in September/October, where if you apply by then you get a guaranteed place, funding, and maybe some extra perk to encourage it, could literally be a slack with the other participants.

Consulting, finance etc have really early processes which people feel pressure to accept in case they don't get anything else, and then don't want to back out of.

Given the probably existence of several catastrophic "tipping points" in climate change, as well as feedback loops more generally such as melting ice reducing solar reflectivity, it seems likely that averting CO2 emissions in the future is less valuable than doing so today.

To do: Figure out an appropriate discount rate to account for this.

I started donating regularly but following the thought process:

Some amount of money exists which is small enough that I wouldn't notice not having it.

This is clearly a lower bound on how much I am morally obligated to donate, because not having it costs me 0 utility, but giving it awa generates positive utility for someone else.

I ended up donating £1/month, but committing never to cancel this and periodically review it. I now donate much, much more.

To do:

Compare the benefits of encouraging other people to take a similar approach with the potentially harm associated with this approach going wrong, specifically moral licensing kicking in at relatively small donation amounts.

Lots of Givewell's modelling assumes that health burdens of diseases or deficiencies are roughly linear in a harm vs. severity sense. This is a defensible default assumption, but seems important enough when you dig in to the analysis that it would be worth investigating when it comes to whether there's a more sensible prior.