All of ChristianKleineidam's Comments + Replies

Debating societies - for instance an initiative to debunk conspiracies.

When it comes to debunking conspiracy theories, the right way to do it is by looking at the evidence. 

Debating societies are inherently about making clever arguments without looking at the evidence. That's not helpful for getting people to deal better with conspiracy theories. 
 

What rules? Those need to be more clear if there is going to be community policing.

This is a good chance for people to write posts about what the rules should be. 

You get there by having more discourse not less. 

It seems that a major problem of a competitor to CEA Community Health is that it's harder for someone outside of the US to have the connection to get the necessary information. 

The Wikileaks strategy against defamation suits was to have the spokesperson of the organization be a digital nomad, so there's no address to which you can easily serve papers for lawsuits. 

Otherwise, maybe Scandinavian countries or some Eastern European ones could have a good combination of low legal costs of lawsuits and strong free speech laws.

Maybe you can do all the money movement for the org in crypto and have no clear country to which the org belongs. 

Though I have less faith in Ben than before after seeing him publish without waiting a week

It seems to me like by publishing it when he did, he acted according to Alice and Chloe's interested who were protected by an earlier publication at a cost to other parties.

If I were in the position of someone like Alice or Chloe and think about whether or not to talk to Ben, that would make me more likely to talk to Ben not less. 

One way might be to replace monoculture fields with more complex farming while everything gets managed by AI. 

Are you sure that virologists didn't write such OPs?

Pretty much, when I googled about the fact that they took down the database I found no such OPeds. If you have any evidence to the contrary I would love to see it.

If you talk about that it's wrong that they took down the database that points to the fact that the early lab leak denial was bullshit and the virologists cared nobody finding out that the arguments they made were bullshit.  

Jeremy Farrar describes in his book that one of the key arguments they used to reject the lab leak theory as the huge... (read more)

The international community funded a database of Coronaviruses that was held by the lab in Wuhan. In September 2019, the month when the Chinese military overtook the lab, that database was taken offline.

If that database would have been important for pandemic prevention and vaccine development, I would have expected the virologists to write OPs publically calling on China to release the data. That they didn't is a clear statement about what they think for how useful that data is for pandemic prevention and how afraid they are that people look critically at ... (read more)

My impression is that one of the key defenses that the Fauci/NIH/EcoHealth/etc. offered for their research in Wuhan was that it was technically not Gain of Function, even if some parts of it might sound like Gain of Function to the layperson, which seems in tension with this claim.

It not only sounds that way to a lay-person. The NIH stopped the EcoHealth grant that was partly paying for the research in Wuhan for a short time in 2016. When they renewed the grant Peter Dasek from EcoHealth wrote back:

"This is terrific! We are very happy to hear that our Gain... (read more)

The other alternative was that there was some coordination about releasing LLM. Plenty of people argue that they somehow should coordinate, so it would not be surprising if they actually did it. 

There's the claim that GPT-4 is better at not going off the guardrails and that Bing runs on GPT-4. How does that fit together with Bing's behavior?

Neither Scotts banning of Vassar nor the REACH banning was quiet. It's just that there's no process by which those people who organize Slate Star Codex meetups are made aware. 

It turns out that plenty of people who organize Slate Star Codex meetups are not in touch with Bay Area community drama.  The person who organized that SSC online meetup was from Israel. 

Even in the comments here where some very harsh allegations are made against him

That's because some of the harsh allegations don't seem to hold up. Scott Alexander spent a significant ... (read more)

There are different concerns when it comes to Authentic Revolution and the EA community. Authentic Revolution hosts events where people become emotionally vulnerable which calls for rules that prevent that vulnerable state from being abused by people leading the events.

In the EA community, a lot of concerns about power abuse are about helping with professional connections. Waiting three months reduces the emotional impact of an Authentic Revolution event but it changes little about the power a person in a leadership role has to help a person to get a job at an EA org. 

Well, you're right that signaling intelligence, creativity, wisdom, and moral virtues is sexually and romantically attractive. 

Signaling intelligence, creativity, wisdom, and moral virtues is not the same as signaling social power by leading events.

To the extent that people have power through their roles, that's not directly about signaling intelligence, creativity, wisdom, and moral virtues. 

Next, there are four other occasions where something a bit like this has happened. How many of these happened after the main events described here? I guess 2 or 3. So even after upsetting someone like this, this pattern continues. This does make me question a Owen's judgenent.

To me, Owen's post reads like he didn't notice at the time that he upset her. Owen writes: "She was in a structural position where it was (I now believe) unreasonable to expect honesty about her experience".

It's unclear how long it took for Owen to know how uncomfortable he made her. 

The great thing about monetary prices is that there are market mechanisms that keep the numbers honest.

If you want to measure your TEMS value you don't have information about a lot of the involved factors that matter. 

By forcing people to collect those values, you force people to spend a lot of work to account for those values and try to get the accounting to look the way they want it to. 

To raise $4.1 trillion in total taxes, the bureaucratic work was around $313 Billion. If you force people to report those TEMS all of those terms are likely sim... (read more)

When thinking about the plastic bottle, we not only care about TEMS we care also how many of those plastic bottles will end up in the ocean and what effects they have in the ocean. 

We care about the health effects of the substances in plastic. Both those that are already scientifically known as well as health impacts we haven't yet researched. 

In Ohio, a train derailment that might have very well in the supply chain of water bottles that were produced a lot of problems. 

If you focus on TEMS you are going to ignore such effects. Ideally, ther... (read more)

You seem to assume that there's a linear relationship between the intervention and the effect. This might be the case for cash transfers but it's not the case for many other interventions.

If you give someone half of a betnet they are not 50% as much protected. 

When it comes to medical treatments it might be that certain side effects only appear at a given dose and as a result you have to do your clinical trial for the dose that you actually want to put into the pill that you sell. 

I was newly open to polyamory, and newly exposed to circling and saw something powerful and good about speaking truths even when they were uncomfortable. 

From what you describe, it sounds to me like you didn't really express truths when they were uncomfortable. 

The truth was that you felt shame. It's easier to be edgy and say "I have to masturbate before I see you" than to say "I feel ashamed of the attraction I have for you. I think I should masturbate so that I don't get aroused by your presence before seeing you.". Saying "I feel ashamed of th... (read more)

I think we have good reason to believe the article is broadly right, even if some of the specific anecdotes don't do a good job of proving this. 

If someone invests a lot of effort into searching for good evidence and comes up empty that's a signal for the availability of good evidence. 

But it's just hard to present evidence that conclusively proves 

That leaves the question of why it's hard. In plenty of communities, it's easy to find a lot of women who were sexually touched without their consent. 

The fact that the article suggests that ... (read more)

What is the total existential risk stemming from pandemics this century? This is a key number in my guesstimate model and I feel like my estimate is an area where I could make quick improvements.

This sounds like a number that could be well-sourced via metaculus. 

If we would have better PPE, hospitals likely would use it also outside of pandemics. 

If we have easier-to-use PPE on the margin more researchers doing dangerous research on pathogens are going to wear PPE.

Both of those can help with pandemic prevention and are those valuable for biorisk but they aren't in the model.

“ethically utilitarian and politically centrist; an atheist, but culturally protestant. He studied analytic philosophy, mathematics, computer science, or economics at an elite university in the US or UK. He is neurodivergent.”. 

safe distance from his middle-class existence

People at elite universities usually don't have middle-class existence. Being at an elite university is a sign of being upper class. 

I was active at that time on LessWrong and mostly go after my memory and memories for something that happened eight years ago isn't perfect.

 https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools-day-confession was to my memory also posted to LessWrong and the LessWrong site of that post is deleted. 

When doing a Google search for the timeframe on LessWrong, that doesn't bring up any mention of Dath Ilan.

Is your memory that Dath Ilan was just never talked about on LessWrong when Eliezer wrote that post?

I think that's the post. As far as my memory goes, the criticism led to Eliezer deleting it from LessWrong. 

The bigger discussion  from maybe 7 years ago that Habryka refers to was as far as my memories goes his April first post  in 2014 about Dath Ilan. The resulting discussion was critical enough of EY that from that point on most of EY's writing was published on Facebook/Twitter and not LessWrong anymore. One his Facebook feed he can simply ban people who he finds annoying but on LessWrong he couldn't.  

- Why the rationalist community seems to treat race/IQ as an area where one should defer to "the scientific consensus" but is quick to question the scientific community and attribute biases to it on a range of other topics like ivermectin/COVID generally,  AI safety, etc. 

With ivermectin we had a time where the best meta-analysis were pro-ivermectin but the scientific establishement was against ivermectin. Trusting those meta reviews that were published in reputable  peer reviewed is poorly understood as "not defering to the scientific conse... (read more)

To the extent that writing on the AI forum matters to EA decision making it has high stakes. Opinions that would actually allow the EA community to course correct have stakes that are worth millions of dollars. 

Banning something that looks like a throwaway account for one month basically is a choice to forbid the person from engaging publically with the criticism that their comment got while doing little else. 

This post being downvoted the way it already clearly signals the community doesn't like the post and moderator action to send that signal isn't really needed. 

There's already a large amount of democratized funding. It's gathered via taxes and spent by bodies that are backed by democratic processes. 

In EA there's a belief that the dollars spent by EA orgs are more efficiently spent than those by the government. Choosing EA as the electorate would be a choice with the intention of not regressing to the average dollar effectiveness of dollars in our government budgets.

In contrast to the budget of our governments and even African governments the budget of EA is very tiny. 

Yes, when it comes to judging people for what they said it's useful to focus on what they actually said. 

Generally, if you have to focus on things that a person didn't say to fuel your own outrage that should be taken as a sign that what they actually said isn't as problematic as your first instinctual response suggests. 

In the self-evaluation of their mistakes, the Intelligence community in the US came to the conclusion that lack of quantification of the likelihood that Saddam didn't have WMDs was one of the reasons they messed up. 

This led to forecasting tournaments which inturn lead to Tetlock's superforcasting. I think the orthodox view in EA is that Tetlock's work is valuable and we should apply its insights. 

You generally read books to understand a thesis in more detail. If there would be a few examples of notable organizations that used democratic decision-making to great effect and someone would want to learn from that, reading a book that gives more details is a great idea. Reading a book to see whether or not a thesis deserves more attention on the other hand makes less sense. 

This would require either membership fees or recording attendance at EA events, so there would be a lot of complexity in making this work.

Given that EA Global is already having an application process that does some filtering you likely could use the attendance lists.

Believing that democracy is a good way to run a country is a different view than believing that it's an effective way to run an NGO. The idea that NGOs whose main funding comes from donors as opposed to membership dues should be run democratically seems like a fringe political idea and one that's found in certain left-wing circles. 

When it comes to extreme views it's worth noting that what's extreme depends a lot of the context. 

A view like "homosexuality should be criminalized" is extreme in Silicon Valley but not in Uganda where it's a mainstream political opinion.  In my time as a forum moderator,  I had to deal with a user from Uganda voicing those views and in cases, like that you have to make choice about how inclusive you want to be of people expressing very different political ideologies. 

In many cases, where the political views of people in Ghana or Ugand... (read more)

Diversity is always a very interesting word and it's interesting that the call for more comes after two of the three scandals mentioned in the opening posts are about EA being diverse along an axis that many EAs disagree with. 

Similarly, it's very strange that a post that talks a lot about the problems of EAs caring too much about other people being value aligned and afterward talk in the recommendations about how there should be more scrutiny to checking whether funders are aligned with certain ethical values.

This gives me the impression that the mai... (read more)

There's plenty of real estate investment that does not depend on the real estate being rented out. That's why laws get passed that require some real estate to be rented out.

One of the attributes of real estate is that it's a lot less liquid than stocks and economic theory suggests that market participants should pay a premium for liquidity. 

Finally, it's wrong to say that anything with less expected returns than stocks is no investment. People all the time invest money in treasury bonds that have less expected returns.

Investing money into the stock market and investing money into real estate are similar. In both cases, the value of your capital can rise or fall over time. 

Okay, it's good to see that it's finally there as it wasn't the last time I publically complained about it. At the time it seemed like apologizing deep in a comment thread was the only action that CEA felt warrented. 

The potential harms of these technologies come from their unbounded scope

Previous technologies also have quite unbounded scopes. That does not seem to me different from the technology of film. The example of film in the post you were replying too also has an unbounded scope.

This can therefore inform the kinds of models / training techniques that are more dangerous: e.g. that for which the scope is the widest

Technologies with a broad scope are more like to be dangerous but they are also more likely to be valuable. 

If you look at the scope of photoshop ... (read more)

When these factors are combined with the high population growth predicted in hotter countries, one report finds that 3.0 degrees celsius of averaged global warming translates to an average temperature increase as felt per individual of 7.5 degrees celsius.¹ The same report estimates that 30% of the world’s predicted population will then be living in areas with an average temperature equal to or above the hottest parts of the Sahara desert by 2070.

It's very unclear how someone can on the one hand expect this kind of damage to be caused by climate change and... (read more)

farmed animals likely have it worse than animals used in research

Why do you believe that farmed animals have it worse?

Farmed animals usually get killed in a way that's designed to be quick and minimize suffering. I would expect, that research animals that die death due to being infected with illnesses or toxicity tests generally die more painful deaths. 

Just because someone tried products for free and then posted about them doesn't mean that they haven't been paid to post about them. 

When I say that I know the German youtuber, I'm meaning that I privately talked with him about how that industry works. 

The people who make the most money in that industry do it through paid product placement.

Andrea Salinas got 36% of the vote while Carrick Flynn got 18%. I think it's pretty clear, that Flynn would have gotten more votes if he wouldn't have been perceived by the press as being funded by ill-intentioned corporate money. 

Whether that would have been enough to get double the amount of votes is unclear but I don't think the available data suggest that this isn't in the realm of what would have been possible. 

What Squad-esque members did POF support?

I agree that Protect Our Future should be a lot more explicit about its agenda. While the Valerie Foushee campaign was successful the Carrick Flynn campaign failed and likely failed for reasons like distrust of PAC money. 

It's unclear to me why the strategic decision of Protect Our Future to be this untransparent was made. Given the amount of money they spend, it was likely that it will get some public attention and the transparency made it look a bit shady.

Clear public-facing criteria would likely be helpful. It makes it clear to the media how Protec... (read more)

I don’t think people who are anti-soy are racist – but convincing a swath of Americans that being anti-soy is culturally insensitive could be one way to reduce stigma.

Such a campaign might also significantly increase the stigma. It could turn soy into a culture war topic. 

If you tell a bodybuilder that he should be less anti-soy because it's culturally insensitive, I would expect that to reinforce anti-soy attitudes for most bodybuilders.

Out-of-house R&D. Instead of hiring a chef, we could inspire food bloggers, restaurant chefs, or CPG brands to develop their own recipes. If we mailed ten $100 tofu boxes to ten different food bloggers, I'd guess that at least one or two would try out, like them, and create a video or two on their channel. 

I know one German youtuber that has a cooking channel. He makes most of his money via paid product placement. I would expect that the same is true for popular US food bloggers as well.

My model would be that those food bloggers generally don't pr... (read more)