All of Charles Dillon 🔸's Comments + Replies
Comparative advantage is not at all load bearing here. The only thing that is load bearing is skepticism that AI capabilities will advance sufficiently and be sufficiently cheap.
From a post on my substack @Nathan Young linked below (now on the EA forum)
...Comparative advantage alone doesn’t mean you get to eat
This is Arthur B’s point above, and mine when I pointed out that there are fewer horses these days than in the past.It is simply a claim that the market clearing price of labour does not have to be sufficient for people to get as much r
If you care about animals I think it is obviously the case that the best bet is to work on finding an angle that Reform will go along with. Given their poll position, the shallowness of their bench and their relatively minimal set of policy commitments, not doing this because they are "problematic" strikes me as putting low-consequence deontological considerations (you aren't going to change the probability they win, it seems unlikely anybody cares about your endorsement) over a potentially huge opportunity for impact.
It's the same thing - if I think the expected value of one thing vs another is 10x, all things considered, then that is what I think the expected value is, already factoring in whatever chance I think there is that I am various versions of wrong, which is very under specified here.
For example, let's say I do a back of the envelope calculation that says ABC is 20x as valuable as XYZ, but I see lots of people disagree with me. Then my estimate of the relative value of ABC vs XYZ will not be 20x, but probably some lower number, which could be 15x or 2x or 0.5...
This seems likely to be incorrect to me, at least sometimes. In particular I disagree with the suggestion that the improvement on the margin is likely to be only on the order of 5%.
Let's take someone who moves from donating to global health causes to donating to help animals. It's very plausible that they may think the difference in effectiveness there is by a factor of 10, or even more.
They may also think that non-EA dollars are more easily persuaded to donate to global health initiatives than animal welfare ones. In this case, if a non-EA dollar is 80% l...
Similarly if you think animal charities are 10x global health charities in effectiveness, then you think these options are equally good:
- Move 10 EA donors from global health to animal welfare
- Add 9 new animal welfare donors who previously weren't donating at all
To me, the first of these sounds way easier.
I think if there were proven methods to persuade such people to give away the excess, the world would look very different.
I hope you find success in persuading those around you to give, but I don't think the process of giving to neighbours and polling resources rather than going directly to supporting specific causes where they could have a lot of impact makes much sense.
Just had another glance at this and I think the delta vs implied vol piece is consistent with something other than a normal/log normal distribution. Consider: the price is $13 for the put, and the delta is 5. This implies something like - the option is expected to pay off a nonzero amount 5% of the time, but the average payoff when it does is $260 (despite the max payoff definitionally being 450). So it looks like this is really being priced as crash insurance, and the distribution is very non normal (i.e. circumstances where NVDA falls to that price means something weird has happened)
Generally I just wouldn't trust numbers from Yahoo and think that's the Occam's Razor explanation here.
Delta is the value I would use before anything else since the link to models of reality is so straightforward (stock moves $1 => option moves $0.05 => clearly that's equivalent to making an extra dollar 5% of the time)
Right now the IV of June 2025 450 calls is 53.7, and of puts 50.9, per Bloomberg. I've no idea where your numbers are coming from, but someone is getting the calculation wrong or the input is garbage.
The spread in the above numbers is likely to do with illiquidity and bid ask spreads more than anything profound.
The IV for puts and calls at a given strike and expiry date will be identical, because one can trivially construct a put or a call from the other by trading stock, and the only frictions are the cost of carry.
The best proxy for probability an option will expire in the money is the delta of the option.
"Nvidia’s implied volatility is about 60%, which means – even assuming efficient markets – it has about a 15% chance of falling more than 50% in a year.
And more speculatively, booms and busts seem more likely for stocks that have gone up a ton, and when new technologies are being introduced."
Do you think the people trading the options setting that implied volatility are unaware of this?
Gonna roll the dice and not click the link, but will guess that Torres and/or Gebru gets cited extensively! https://markfuentes1.substack.com/p/emile-p-torress-history-of-dishonesty - such a shame this excellent piece doesn't get more circulation
I don't understand why you think this is the case. If you think of the "distribution of grants given" as a sum of multiple different distributions (e.g. upskilling, events, and funding programmes) of significantly varying importance across cause areas, then more or less dropping the first two would give your overall distribution a very different shape.
Type 1 diabetic and long time EA here.
Generally when I have donated to help people directly (most of my recent donations have not been of this form, to be clear, in recent years my donations have been focused on research or on helping animals) I am not really thinking about how big the problem is. I am thinking "what will the consequence of this donation be?" If I am donating less than millions of dollars, I'm not likely to solve the whole issue, so the question of if the issue is big or small in a global sense just isn't very important.
For type 1 diabetes...
I think the layout of this post is quite reader unfriendly.
I strongly suggest you start with a full summary rather than just an intro, and don't bury your conclusions midway between the post and some very long appendices which are unlikely to be very useful to 90% of readers.
As it is, anyone wishing to respond in depth would basically have to do the work of summarizing the post themselves, which increases the friction on feedback.
I was not aware of the enormous weigth of aquaculture on final fish production. I was thinking it was around 10%, but it is close to one half.
https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-aquaculture
Onmizoid is rigth, and I have retracted my comment.
This conceptually seems similar to the meat eater problem argument against global health interventions.
You may be aware of this already, but I think there is a clear difference between saving an existing person who would otherwise have died - and in the process reducing suffering by also preventing non-fatal illnesses - and starting a pregnancy because before starting a pregnancy the person doesn't exist yet.
I think a lot of this coordination is implicit rather than explicit, and I don't think it's very well publicised (and there's room for marginal donations to change whether the org gets funded to their high Vs medium target for example, and signalling value that individuals think this is good, so I do not mean to say that this is the only consequence of a donation).
I think there is a misconception here - when it is said that these charities will be fully funded anyway, what that can mean is that they will try to fundraise for a certain budget (perhaps with high/medium/low targets) and larger donors will often choose to fill the remaining gap in their fundraising late in the fundraising process.
This means you are often not really giving the charity extra on top of their budget, but in practice funging with the largest donors. The largest donors will then often give slightly less to them and give to their next best opt...
Suggestion: pre-commit to a ranking method for forecasters. Chuck out questions which go to <5%/>95% within a week. Take the pairs (question, time) with 10n+ updates within the last m days for some n,m, and no overlap (for questions with overlap pick the time which maximises number of predictions). Take the n best forecasters per your ranking method in the sample and compare them to the full sample and the "without them" sample.
I expect the population of users will have similar propensity to update on most questions. The biggest reason for updating some questions more often is new facts emerging which cause changes of mind. This is a massive confounder here, since questions with ex ante surprising updates seem harder to predict almost by definition.
I don't have many strong opinions on this topic, but one I do have and think should be standard practice is recusing oneself from decisions involving current or former romantic partners.
That means not being involved in hiring processes and grantmaking decisions involving them, and not giving them references without noting the conflict of interest. This is very standard in professional organisations for good reason.
I think the point is well made by Lorenzo, as someone who understands what the linked text is referring to and doesn't need to click on the link. I think it is good that the link is there for those who do not know what he meant or want clarification.
In general I think it is a bad idea to demand more work from people communicating with you - it discourages them from trying to communicate in the first place. This is similar to the trivial inconvenience point itself.
I think there should be much more focus on the question of whether this is actually a positive intervention than just one paragraph noting that you haven't thought about the benefits.
The claim that most smokers don't seem to want to quit seems really important to me, and could reduce the scale of the problem to the effects of secondhand smoke vs net benefits to smokers, which might be better treated with other policies (like indoor smoking bans for example).
The Gruber paper (linked below in my comment) suggests that reducing smoking actually makes the population of smokers and potential smokers happier.
In any case, it doesn't appear to me true that most smokers don't want to quit - see data on the US and even in China where most people don't want to quit, a strong majority (70%) supports the government doing more to control smoking.
Interesting post. I haven't conducted the depth research to verify most of the figures, but I do think the idea that you have a 55% chance of success with a $208k 1 year advocacy campaign pretty implausible and suspect there's something dubious going on with the method of estimating P(success) here.
I think an appropriate fact to incorporate which I did not see would be "actual costs of lobbying in the US" and "frequency of novel regulations passing" on which I presume there is quite a bit of data available.
Just a note on Jane Street in particular - nobody at Jane Street is making a potentially multi year bet on interest rates with Jane Street money. That's simply not in the category of things that Jane Street trades. If someone at Jane Street wanted to make betting on this a significant part of what they do, they'd have to leave and go elsewhere and find someone to give them at least hundreds of millions of dollars to make the bet.
A few thoughts, though I wouldn't give them too much weight:
The considerations I can think of look something like:
(1)Sonnen does work with some positive externalities.
(2)Sonnen makes some profit, which either goes to Shell shareholders, net of taxes, or might be used to finance other Shell activities.
(3)Shell might be able do other things with negative externalities and suffer fewer consequences due to positive PR effects from Sonnen.
Since Shell will probably evaluate other projects on their own merit, and can easily borrow money in financial markets, (2) ...
I think banning someone for a pattern of comments like this would be overly heavy handed and reflect badly on the forum, especially when many of Sabs' comments are fairly productive (I just glanced through recent comments and the majority had positive karma and made decent points IMO).
To be concrete about it, I think a somewhat rude person with good points to make, coming here and giving their perspective, mostly constructively, is something we should want more of rather than less at the current margin. It's not like the EA forum is in any short term danger of becoming a haven for trolling and rudeness, and if there are concerns it is heading in that direction at any point it should be possible to course correct.
I agree strongly here re: GWWC. I think it is very odd that they endorse a charity without a clear public explanation of why the charity is effective which could satisfy a mildly skeptical outsider. This is a bar that this clearly does not reach in my opinion. They don't need to have the same evidential requirements as Givewell, but the list of charities they recommend is sufficiently long that they should prefer to have a moderately high bar for charities to make that list.
To admit my priors here: I am very skeptical of Strong Minds effectiveness given th...
Your "best guess" is that the effect of a deworming treatment on happiness is a sudden benefit followed by a slow decline relative to no treatment? Do you have any theory of action that explains why this would be the case?
Trying to draw conclusions from such a dramatically underpowered study (with regard to this question) strikes me as absurd.
"However, maybe a small minority happy to do it would gradually build momentum over time." This seems possible, but if the goal is to maximise resources, I would be quite surprised if e.g. the number of billionaires willing to give away 99.99%+ of their wealth was even 1/10th as high as the number willing to give away 90%. Clearly nobody truly needs $100m+, but nonetheless I would be very wary of potentially putting off a Bill Gates (who lives in a $150m house ) due to being too demanding, when 99% of his wealth does approximately 99% as much good as all o...
I think a compelling reason for not doing this is mostly that it is past what I would guess the optimal level of demandingness would be for growing the movement. I would expect far fewer high earners would be willing to take on a prescription that they keep nothing above that sort of level than that they donate a substantial fraction.
I for one would find it too demanding, and I think it would be very bad if others like me (for context, I will be donating over 50% of my income this year) bounced off the movement because it seemed too demanding.
"I genuinely thought SBF was comfortable with our interview being published and knew that was going to happen. "
This is not credible, and anyone who thinks this is credible is engaged in motivated reasoning.
I still think you should have published the interview, but you don't need to lie about this.
"Typically, this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than addressing the substance of the argument itself."
Jonas said that Nathan was making overblown claims here and on Twitter. In particular the inclusion of "and on Twitter" points to Nathan as someone engaged in irresponsible conduct, without addressing his substance, and thus meets the definition of an ad hominem IMO.
My second point addresses your point 2. As I said, there are many people w...
I think this is an irresponsible ad hominem to be posting without any substance or link to substance whatsoever. There are many EAs who know a lot about crypto and read the forum - if there are substantial criticisms to be made I think you can expect them to make them without this vague insinuation.
It's important that this is not an ad hominem.
I'm torn between:
- It is pretty annoying when Nathan has come in with a best-guess doc, being very transparent, to get such a blanket and vague statement argued from authority. An EA community that lost its ability to have open discussion and relied on authority like that would be a worse one indeed. And:
- If Jonas has received a tip from someone, but does not want to reveal his source, and his source does not want to post more details, this is the best Jonas can do. Jonas has added information to the commons, and been rewarded by losing karma.
You seem to be hung up on proving comparative advantage "not applying" for some reason, but there is basically no circumstance where it does not apply, in theory.
It simply doesn't matter, because human equilibrium wages can still go to zero regardless of comparative advantage still applying, and that matters far more. Comparative advantage is a distraction - that is the point of this post.