All of basil.halperin's Comments + Replies

Raimondo and the Department of Commerce seem to have been remarkably effective on AI/China issues during the Biden administration. Is there any detailed reporting on how governance became (seemingly) so good there?

(Nothing useful to contribute but wanted to say this seems very nice!)

The fact that Alameda could and did “borrow” (much) more than any other account on FTX due to the allow_negative flag is consistent with Levine’s description, but I agree a fuller accounting of events would include this piece of information and the accusations you cite.

Thanks for this, this is a topic I am very interested in -- to the the killer feature missing in Speechify is the ability to highlight and sync those highlights. Or more broadly, annotating in a multimodal way is difficult.

I instead use Goodreader, where you can have e.g. a Dropbox folder of all your PDFs synced across desktop and mobile; and you can annotate those PDFs while listening, then sync to Dropbox.

The downside of Goodreader is that the voice is pretty bad, and also that you can't reflow the text to make it easier to read on mobile while in audio ... (read more)

Any links on the referenced strategic review? Thanks!

Forgive me if I'm just being dumb, but -- does anyone know if there is a way in settings to revert to the old font/CSS? I'm seeing a change that (for me) makes things harder to read/navigate.

(Nice, thanks for sharing)

Levered ETFs exhibit path dependency, or "volatility drag", because they reset their leverage daily, which means you can't calculate the return without knowing what the interest rate does in between the 3% rise

The entire section is based on a first-order approximation, as explicitly noted in the post (which is also why we set aside e.g. the important issue of convexity). This point is of course correct!

A related point: The US stock market has averaged 10% annual returns over a century. If your style of reasoning worked, we should instead buy a 3x levered S

Thanks for these comments!

• The short answer here is: yes agreed, the level of real interest rates certainly seems consistent with "market has some probability on TAI and some [possibly smaller] probability on a second dark age".
• Whether that's a possibility worth putting weight on -- speaking for myself, I'm happy to leave that up to readers. 
  • (ie: seems unlikely to me! What would the story there be? Extremely rapid diminishing returns to innovation from the current margin, or faster-than-expected fertility declines?)
• As you say, perhaps the possibility o

Yes, to emphasize, the post is meant to define the situation under consideration as: "something close to a 10x increase in growth; or death". We're interested in this scenario only because it's the modal scenario in the particular world of LW/EA/AI safety.

The logic of the argument does not apply as forcefully to "smaller" changes (which could potentially still be quite large), and would not apply at all if AI did not increase growth (ie did not decrease marginal utility of consumption)!

To summarise, the effect on equities seems ambiguous to you, but it's clearly negative on bonds, so investors would likely tilt towards equities.

"Negative for bonds" does not imply "shift investment from bonds to stocks", though. It could mean "shift toward short bonds" or  "shift investment from bonds, to just invest less overall".

In addition, the sharpe ratio of the optimal portfolio is decreased (since one of the main asset classes is worse)

I would push back on this too, for a related reason -- the optimal portfolio can include "go short bonds", wh... (read more)

Here's another way of putting things, that I'll post here for reference:

Suppose I think Google is undervalued, because it is going to have a $1T dividend in 2030, and the market doesn't realize this.

1. I buy Google today at some cheap price.

2. Possibility 1: before 2030, the market "corrects" and realizes that it was undervaluing Google. The stock price rises, and I receive capital gains.

3. Possibility 2: the market does not "correct" before 2030. I still get the big dividend in 2030, and was able to get it for a cheap price in 2023.

---

The abov... (read more)

1. Very interesting, thanks, I think this is the first or second most interesting comment we've gotten.

2. I see that you are suggesting this as a possibility, rather than a likelihood, but I'll note at least for other readers that -- I would bet against this occurring, given central banks' somewhat successful record at maintaining stable inflation and desire to avoid deflation. But it's possible!

3. Also, I don't know if inflation-linked bonds in the other countries we sample -- UK/Canada/Australia -- have the deflation floor. Maybe they avoid this issue.

4.... (read more)

Thanks for these comments. In short, to all of your questions, the answer is "yes". Some specific comments:

1. This is perhaps already clear, but it might be worth emphasizing that the economic logic is: real rates are particularly use for forecasting, since the sign of the effect is rather unambiguous for the TAI scenario; but it's possible the expected returns could be higher for trading on other bets, if you're willing to make stronger assumptions (e.g. "compute will be important").

2. Re: equities, the appendix post (especially #4 there) summarizes how w... (read more)

I'll just pop back in here briefly to say that (1) I have learned a lot from your writing over the years, (2) I have to say I still cannot see how I misinterpreted your comment, and (3) I genuinely appreciate your engagement with the post, even if I think your summary misses the contribution in a fundamentally important way (as I tried to elaborate elsewhere in the thread).

Thanks for this interesting exercise. The one caveat I'd note is that the multiplier you use is based on annual  revenue -- if the remittances from OpenAI to MSFT occur over a number of years, we would need to divide the $1T number that you calculate by that number of years.

(PS: amazing tiktoks)

Thanks Seth, we'll read your paper carefully. I'll just highlight that really the purpose of the analysis above is to engage specifically  with the extreme scenario you mention at the end

what the effect would be today of a giant anticipated increase in automation in 30 years, or of everyone dying with certainty in 30 years [...] we could try if anyone thinks it would be interesting

Also note we briefly allude to demographic trends, but in the (blog post!) analysis here, we want to ignore them because they seem plausibly swamped by the huge growth/morta... (read more)

1. We would welcome engagement from you regarding our argument that stock prices are not useful for forecasting timelines (the sign is ambiguous and effect noisy).

2. You offer what is effectively a full general argument against market prices ever being swayed by anything -- a bit more on this point here. Price changes do not need to be driven by volume! (cf the no-trade theorem, for the conceptual idea)

3. I'm not sure if this is exactly your point about prediction markets (or if you really want to talk about total capital, on which see again #2), but: ... (read more)

Sorry, I stand by my comment 110%.

If you already knew that belief in AGI soon was a very contrarian position (including amongst the most wealthy, smart, and influential people), I don't think you should update at all on the fact that the market doesn't expect AGI.

I want to maximally push back on views like this. The economic logic for the informational efficiency of markets has nothing  to do with consensus or 'non-contrarianness'. Markets are informationally efficient because of the incentive for those who are most informed to trade.

The argument here... (read more)

^This is an extremely, extremely important point!

Market prices are not a democracy. The logic for the efficiency of markets is emphatically NOT 'wisdom of the crowds'. It's that the most knowledgeable traders have the most to gain from trading, and so do so, and determine the price. (I have a riff on this here)

Thanks for this -- I think you put really nicely the interpretation that we also are pushing for.

If you don't like the OpenAI example, consider the possibility that other non-public companies could develop AGI...!

The appendix 3 has a review of some related papers, FWIW!

(And: thanks!)

Pasting some of my replies to this from twitter FWIW:

• That's just not correct, unless I'm misunderstanding -- 
  if you short rates, and next day the market decides you are right, then real rates spike and you make money. Simple as that 
  So I don't follow your claim ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• Sovereign debt markets are the some of the most well-functioning financial markets ever created by man -- this is literal orders of magnitude off. This is just not tether
• also

FWIW -- eventually wrote up some more thoughts on this here.

Will subforum posts feature on the main RSS feed? Thanks!

^seconding this question 😊

One crude metric: the number of forecasters has gone up 25% in the last month, from n=284 to n=354

It would be interesting if it were possible to disambiguate:

1. Previous forecasters moved up their forecasts to shorter timelines

vs.

2. New forecasters, who have shorter timelines, offered forecasts for the question when they hadn't forecasted previously

Both are informative, and in a real-money prediction market both are equally informative. But with a forecasting platform, this could "just" be a composition bias?

Cascading, systemic and GCRs typically aren’t priced into asset prices

I'm not sure that this is important to your arguments, but -- do you have any evidence that this is actually the case?

For diaphragmatic breathing, where are you getting the 27.05% number from? I didn't see it in the Hamasaki (2020) lit review you linked to.

Also, looking at that paper:

• It seems like most of the RCTs are run on people with underlying conditions: asthma, cancer, etc. Of course this is of interest, but is not of general interest to generally healthy populations
• In section 3.2.4 on RCTs involving healthy subjects, I only see studies on
  • The effect on motion sickness
  • Smokers
  • The effect on "forced vital capacity" when done in conjunction with upper body work
  • The effect

I like this writeup a lot, but I would say to anyone who's actually reading this should ignore the advice to not go into academia.

If you're reading this, you're probably selected  (!) to be someone who is atypical and has a decent shot at succeeding in academia. (See also: SSC on 'reversing all advice you hear'.) i.e.: if you're someone who's taking the time out of your day to read this, you're probably (probably!) similar to "Anita" here.

Agreed re: "mispricing = restatement that this is a contrarian position" -- but to push back on your "lack of feedback" point:

If the market can't price 30-year cashflows, it can't price anything, since for any infinitely-lived asset (eg stocks!), most of the present-discounted value of future cash flows is far in the future. 

See eg this Ralph Koijen thread and linked paper, "the first 10 years of dividends only make up ~20% of the value of the stock market. 80% is due to value of cash flows beyond 10 years"

(I wonder how big EMH proponents like Hanson and Yudkowsky explain the dissonance.)

Personally I agree with the economic forecasts and approximate timelines here, but I haven’t seen a way of reconciling the “accelerating growth” prediction with the efficient market hypothesis.

Low 30-year government bond rates in the US (and 50- or 100-year rates in some other countries!) imply the market expects low growth over this time horizon, not ever-accelerating economic growth rates.

If growth goes up and interest rates rise, these are massively overvalued. It’s possible, but, we’d have to tell some some more elaborate stories (AI-led growth is not broad-based? It’s all captured by one firm...? It FOOMs?) if we want to be consistent with EMH.

This smells like a composition effect. Have you checked that this is not just due to e.g. aging of the population; or driven by the rise in immigration?

This is great -- thank you for doing this.

When you write it like that, it seems obvious :)

Thanks.