Charlie_Guthmann
Bio
pre-doc at Data Innovation & AI Lab
previously worked in options HFT and tried building a social media startup
founder of Northwestern EA club
Posts 13
Comments292
YESSSSS didn't think I would get to see some hoops on the forum, thanks.
But I would be remiss to not give credit to 2 other dudes who should get some love from EA, Morey and Harden! To be fair trying to assign exact credit for who spurred the 3 pt revolution is hard and I don't claim to be confident, and also it is definitely true that curry helped accelerate the revolution, though I would probably put the curry warriors as the 2nd or 3rd most important group in doing so.
I think the Morey/Harden/rockets (and possibly seven seconds suns but will ignore for now) probably deserve more credit, although definitely curry/warriors if you mean who made the public think 3>2. (and I'm not claiming that the point of your post was to give curry all or the most credit, I just can't help myself in filling in some more basketball history for those interested).
The thing about curry is he is the greatest to ever shoot it. You simply can't acquire a curry. Also, my read of Steve Kerr is that he is honestly not that analytic pilled as a coach. Like he is certainly on the more forward thinking side but he's not a math demon the way Morey was. He did have them running an incredible offensive scheme though don't get me wrong, but it was highly artistic and free flowing.
Morey was kinda the one to realize that you really shouldn't take midrange at all. This was the first domino in the revolution (although looking at the midrange chart above, seems like league had been slowly realizing that before him). You should never ever ever take a step in, which players often did. In fact, you should often take a step back even if you are open from the midrange (although the step back didn't explode in popularity till later). And you should put your role players on the three point line in the corners/wings, not in the midrange (and similarly, you should acquire players who can hit those shotes).
I also think while on first glance, it's easy to think of the 3 pt revolution as completely analogous to something like the shift in baseball - basically pure math that would have been true at any point in the league - I think it's probably at least a little less of a brain fart (though still mostly a brain fart) than it might initially seem. I think there was actually a series of (relatively simple) innovations that had to occur.
Just because league 3pt TS% > 2 pt TS% (in the halfcourt), this doesn't mean that the marginal 3 pt is higher EV / TS than the marginal 2 pt. Now I happen to think that it still probably was (i.e. like a good shooter jacking up some contested 3 still better than replacement 2 from that team), but you have to figure out exactly how to generate those extra 3s. At first I think it's obvious, just replace the middies with the threes. But then you have done picked all of this fruit, and now you have to figure out some more complicated ways to generate more.
Some (haters like myself) might argue this is where the warriors really came into play. The warriors abused moving screens harder than had ever been done in the history of the league, and in doing so, they were able to generate a few more clean looks a game. This definitely was very influential and you can see the proliferation today, with almost every screen set in the nba today being technically illegal (I hate to call this an innovation but...).
After everyone started abusing the moving screens, we needed even more innovations to generate new threes. Again I think here Harden and Morey shine, with the step back 3 revolution occuring around 2017-2018 by Harden.
Anyway I'm super pedantic and I don't think this changes the implications of your post at all, just excited to write about basketball on the forum and wanted to add my 2 cents.
giving up ~0.00000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the lightcone is easily worth it on moral uncertainty grounds.
Agreed this seems prudent and plausible, but not so much so that I would feel confident that this would be the result of CEV ish stuff. Despite some of the technical hurdles mentioned involved with trying to meaningfully specify up front/value locking that we get to keep this solar system for us and the animals I feel like I could be convinced this is still the more likely path to end up in a good future for us (but not all sentient life throughout the lightcone).
But also, if the CEV of human values involves killing all humans, then doesn't that kinda mean killing all humans is the correct thing to do?
yea but the correct thing (from a human CEV) to do isn't equivalent to what is good for humans (and animals). I might be getting into button pushing semantics here.
I'm not sure why you think baking CEV into AI will result in a good future for animals (or humans), though if we are talking about "all sentient beings", I guess I would say probably. It seems quite likely to me that if there is a "CEV attractor state" or similar, it involves killing us all - I don't say this because I don't love animals or humanity. I just don't see how it could be remotely possible that we (earth evolved humans and animals) are efficient utility producers (by a wide range of definitions of "utility"). That being said, if CEV or similar is a real coherent concept, it almost certainly would prevent permanent torture/s-risks which would be nice.
but CEV is a fuzzy concept to me so might be misunderstanding (i've read the lw page and some other basic stuff and have a basic sense of stance deference and cosmopolitanism) .
Anthropic itself isn't Molochian - The molochian-ness (idk if I'm using this term right I don't read SSC) is that any time there is a disagreement in the community over some issue, and one side aligns more with the real worlds outer loops (money, status, intellectual sexiness), that side will naturally acquire more power within the movement because the movement does not have any way to counteract this other than persuasion which is increasingly difficult as the problems we deal with get more abstract and complex.
Yes I wrote it (with some help from Claude), glad you enjoyed it!
You are right your specific worry/content of the post is narrower, and generally I think you have approximately the right sense for what is going on and didn't mean for the parable to be an exact fictional substitute for your post but just related. Also maybe I missed it but I think you forgot to mention the selection effect of those who ends up at anthropic itself, which is arguably bigger than the value drift inside of it - the tower was to some extent built by believers!. It's always hard for me to write these comments because I feel as though I could write a 40 page book about the group dynamics in EA :P.
I really do love this community but I basically have given up on it (in terms of my views of the long run trajectory, i still love the people and read what they write religiously). I think it's already too late and it's been institutionally/culturally captured. I'm never certain of course but I think probably FTX was EAs last chance to put in real political/financial policies (some of which you mentioned/gestured at) that stop it from value drifting with outer status/money loops, and at this point it's most likely a waste of time to try to fix it. I didn't realize it at the time but this is how I feel looking back. I mean god damn we didn't even clear house of the majority of the people directly implicated in the scandal! That would have been a bare minimum, I think.
The problems are real but increasingly my advice is: you are better of hopping to something like humanism and working on improving it if you want to see the solutions implemented. The forum and EA movement at large if you don't live in a group house or for a prestigious EA org or have a bunch of money is basically when your older brother hands you an unplugged controller. I read the forum almost every day and have done so for years so one starts to pick up on some patterns. Since FTX I see a post like yours approx once a month (although more recently). They usually get between 20-50 upvotes so there is definitely some sort of coalition there but it's small and basically never does someone powerful in the movement interact with these posts, you can decide if that's a coincidence or not. And ultimately the posts always seem drift away with the wind. In this sense one can see how the movement would get accused of being paid opposition or something like that.
Personally, I will be hopping ship the first chance I get (i.e. as soon as another community has a close level of intellectual rigor without the horrible incentives and incoherent structure). And yes I will still call myself an effective altruist :), only if asked will I clarify the lowercaseness of that statement. (see I always write way too much - I'm working on it lol).
There was a question so simple that no honest person could refuse.
A child is drowning.
Do you help?
From this, a city sprouted.
In the beginning there were no buildings. There was a leap.
And then a plunge.
Some cold wet socks.
And a coughing child firmly on solid earth.
Those who witnessed firsthand saw how vast and strong the river was, and how many more children they could not save. Word spread and one leap became many. Small structures began to rise along the great riverbank. As more came they brought new ideas.
One day, someone decided to start counting. If you mapped out the expected distribution of drownings, you could triage. One jump could save two. Or a smaller leap might go further than another requiring more bravery. This counting was not a betrayal of the original question. It was the question taken seriously.
From this the towers grew. In the towers the modelers worked and lived. At first the towers were short and adjacent to the riverbank. The modelers invented new tools - nets, boats, buoys, weather systems, river maps. These were real. They were the question taken seriously. With the help of those at the riverbanks children were rescued at rates never dreamt over.
Many of the people in the towers had been at the river once — stringing ropes, placing floats. They understood that an hour spent modeling could save more children than a year at the water. This was provably true.
The people who maintained the ropes and ladders were still respected. They were thanked at ceremonies.
Nonetheless the success of the towers spurred more towers. Each new tower asked a bigger question. What about the children far downstream? The river turned into a huge delta. The tools available would be much better deployed there than at the cities adjacent rapids. And so on.
And each answer to each question was bigger than the last, and at some point the answer was really big and the bigness was the point. But this was not a perversion of the question, it was the question taken seriously.
And so the towers shot into the sky. Big questions require big models and big tools and big solutions. The towers debated the hard questions. Honestly, rigorously, sometimes for years. People changed their minds. Studies were revised. The city prided itself on this — it was, in fact, better at updating than anywhere else. The debates were real. It was just that the city's center of gravity never moved very far.
Some left. The city wished them well and did not study where they went.
To build these towers the modelers needed money. They recruited people of extreme wealth who were drawn by the very same question. These people were very generous and funded the towers, and the docks, and the nets, and the boats, and the medicine for the ear infections and anything else you could think of. This was all very real, and many lives were saved. The city had no elections, no recall votes, no formal process for anything. The billionaires simply funded the work, and the work followed the funding, and the funding followed the billionaires' interests, and the billionaires' interests followed from the models, which the billionaires had funded.
One day one of these philanthropists made a bet. The bet was large, and it failed. The bet’s rationale at least had the appearance of being built on the machinery of the city. Not everyone thought the bet served the city's purpose. But the reasoning was layered and the models were complex and it was genuinely hard to say whether the bet was a betrayal of the city's logic or its fullest expression. The loss was large enough that programs closed and people at the river were called home. The city was shaken. The city had meetings about it. The city discussed accountability. The city discussed reform.
Some towers altered their appearance, and the riverbank looked different too, it had to after all, with the new lack of funds. But overall the city was still the same. To meaningfully change the city, the city would have to have decided that it was in fact a city, governed by interests. The city could not admit this. The core premise of the city was that the counting was not politics but math.
And so the city continued. In time the bet was old history and the children kept getting saved and the towers continued off into the sky.
The city has no architect. Nobody designed it. A thousand people made a thousand kind decisions and the decisions accumulated into a shape, and the shape made more of itself. There is no one to confront. There is nothing wrong with any single part of it.
Matches my intuition, I think there aren't that many experts and some of them already know how to make dangerous viruses and/or already have access to the labs. Practically speaking between 2027-2028 I'd assume the main uplift will be for people with like a bachelors in bio or chem and good at using frontier AI.
Also underrated: being able to quickly gather a list of biology experts and biology labs that work on dangerous stuff near you with a break down of how deadly/contagious each is. Don't need to be an expert to rob a bank. Yesterday a friend who goes to Hopkins sent me a photo of a poster in front of a lab in the hallway that said "ZIKA VIRUS IS USED IN THIS LAB DO NOT PASS THROUGH AS A SHORTCUT"
Very cool.
I work on text parsing / meta science and do a lot of stuff like this on the side and for my lab.
https://docgmedicalsummaries.com/rankings
I've done something similar for ranking clinical medicine articles, it's pretty similar to your site but might be able to share some insights. (might comment more later regardless, just throwing this up for now so I remember).
edit: also signing up will auto subscribe you to emails just to note but should be easy to unsubscribe, can also see how we do rankings without signing up on the landing page.