All of Closed Limelike Curves's Comments + Replies
"AI is powerful and uncontrollable and could kill all of humanity, like seriously" is not a complicated message.
Anything longer than 8 morphemes is probably not going to survive Twitter or CNN getting their hands on it. I like the original version ("Literally everyone will die") better.
In what sense? The problem of potential helium scarcity has been (effectively) solved in the last few years by just looking for more helium deposits.
In a sense, we are "running out" (because there's only a finite supply of Helium), we're just running out very, very slowly.
Actually, maybe I should clarify this. This is standard practice when you hire a decent statistician. We've known this since like... the 1940s, maybe?
But a lot of organizations and clinical trials don't do this because they don't consult with a statistician early enough. I've had people come to me and say "hey, here's a pile of data, can you calculate a p-value?" too many times to count. Yes, I calculated a p-value, it's like 0.06, and if you'd come to me at the start of the experiment we could've avoided the million-dollar boondoggle
that you just created.
You’re completely correct! However, it’s worth noting this is standard practice (when the treatment makes up most of the cost, which it usually doesn’t). Most statisticians will be able to tell you about this.
So I think I have two comments:
- It’s actually pretty neat you figured this out by yourself, and shows you have a decent intuition for the subject.
- However, if you’re a researcher at any kind of research institution, and you run or design RCTs, this suggests an organizational problem. You’re reinventing the wheel, and need to consult with a statistici
There's an EA cause area in this, but it's not tooth-related. Our jaws are perfectly fine. The problem is bad incentives in the healthcare system; dentists get paid to take wisdom teeth out, not to leave them in, so about 90% of wisdom tooth extractions are unnecessary.
The mortality rate of anesthesia is not quite negligible; a couple hundred people have died because of anesthesia during wisdom tooth removal, and there's also the risk of infection.
With regard to differing forms of , the article you linked notes:
Despite these minor differences in processing, each of these forms is probably equally effective when equal doses are given.
Which is understating things a bit: All the minor variants will be identical after dissolving in the body -- anyhydrous creatine will become hydrated, and particle size is 0 after the creatine has dissolved. The only (minor) difference is that micronized creatine will dissolve slightly faster if you mix it with a drink, because of the smaller particle size. This can be m...
I'd rephrase that, maybe. Whether we're asking people to make a change doesn't matter--that's assigning an unearned privilege to old ideas. The reason we have to justify this claim is because it's a claim. If you're saying "I know vegetarianism is healthier," you should be able to explain how you know that.
If you're wondering whether the above studies leave some room for including fish in your diet: My guess is yes, pescetarianism is likely to be slightly healthier, because of the aforementioned effects of polyunsaturated fats (including omega-3 fatty acids). This is why doctors also recommend the Mediterranean diet a lot, although it's not clear how much of the effect comes from fish and how much from vegetables. Omega-3 supplements definitely help.
The quality of research is already there: See my comment here.
I'm not aware of any newer studies on creatine after the original one that spawned this belief; I will point out the original studies were likely aggressively p-hacked, showed impossible effect sizes, and make very little sense because brain creatine levels are not substantially different between vegetarians and vegans.
Still, it's not completely out of the question there's a real effect. We still want to avoid the fallacy of the one-sided bet. It's definitely possible that vegetarianism causes a...
With regards to protein: studies consistently show getting enough protein to prevent sarcopenia or other diseases is not especially difficult, and in fact most people get substantially more than the recommended daily allowances. Also important is that consuming animal protein is positively correlated with all-cause mortality, while plant protein is negatively correlated. From what I can tell, though, this is probably because fiber is confounding the results.
Moving on from observational studies and to randomized controlled trials, it's unclear whether prote...
The value of both can both rise or fall, but real estate is only an investment when rented out. Otherwise, it's a durable consumption good. In particular, the EMH* implies the expected value of buying real estate and renting it out must be equal to the expected return on stocks. Otherwise, people would stop sell stocks (driving their price down, and therefore the rate of return up) and then buy real estate to lease it out.
*While it's entirely plausible the EMH doesn't hold, no analysis arguing this is presented, and I don't think that placing bets on...
Is Wytham Abbey being used 365 days a year, though? A couple thousand a day is a perfectly reasonable cost for a conference. But why would you need to own a space that large permanently? I’d be just as shocked at the idea of renting out Oxford College’s conference hall 365 days a year. Nobody is having that many conferences.
The calculations there are completely correct under the assumption that the space is being used 365 days a year, which strikes me as wildly implausible. I was working on the assumption the is space used a few days each year. If this space is actually being occupied 100% of the time, I’d gladly retract my criticism.
The question here isn’t whether building a new castle from scratch would cost £15,000,000, or whether the real estate is properly valued; I assume it is. The question is whether you need to buy a castle to host yearly or monthly conferences—to which the answer is clearly not.
Investing £15,000,000 would yield roughly £1,000,000 a year on the stock market. If you are spending a million pounds on the venue for a conference, you are not doing it right. A convention hall runs in the tens of thousands of dollars, not the millions. This is a 10-100x markup.
£15,000,000 sounds like a lot to a researcher because it is.
I refuse to believe that renting out a conference hall would actually have cost more.
Investing £15,000,000 a year would yield roughly £1,000,000 a year on the stock market. If you are spending a million pounds on the venue alone for a 1,000 person conference, you are not doing it right. A convention hall typically runs in the tens of thousands of dollars, not the millions. This is a 100x markup.
This comment suggests that renting conference venues in Oxford can be pretty expensive:
Your cost estimates seems to be in the wrong order of magnitude.
A typical researcher might make £100,000 a year. £15,000,000 is roughly £1,000,000 a year if invested in the stock market. So you could hire 5 researchers to work full-time, in perpetuity.
Conferences are cool, but do you really think they generate as much research as 5 full time researchers would? As a researcher, I can tell you flat-out the answer is no. I could do much more with 5 people working for me than I could by going to even a thousand conferences.
Certainly makes sense to bring in PR resources, but let’s be clear that much worse ethical scandals than “One rich guy who donated to this turned out to have committed fraud” have frequently failed to destroy social movements. This will probably hurt EA, but is unlikely to permanently ruin its reputation unless it leads EAs to disaffiliate themselves from the movement to avoid negative PR—i.e. if most of its supporters are more concerned about optics and signaling than doing good.
The only way EA can be destroyed is if EAs, not non-EAs, abandon it.
…is what you tell yourself before you get exposed for committing massive fraud, costing far more billions than you ended up with.
If SBF did commit fraud, it looks like he did it to keep Alameda from going bankrupt. If that’s the case, he ended up destroying billions of dollars of potential donations from FTX. “Take a risk that might let you earn a billion dollars illegally” and “Make 0 dollars” are not your only options here! You could have taken not-illegal risks that might have won big instead. Those tend to have higher EV.
>The egoistic motivation for donating is highly scope insensitive – giving away $500 feels roughly as good as giving away $50,000. I haven’t found any academic evidence on this, but it’s been robustly true in my experience.
There's academic evidence and it disagrees; the amount of donations matters. (It's nonlinear, but so is the effect of spending on anything.) I suppose you could probably increase it by giving smaller amounts more frequently--having a tiny notification on your computer that goes "Congrats on donating $10!" or whatever.
I think there are two tacks to take here, depending on whether your goal is reducing racial disparities or addressing discrimination itself.
1. Because of the heavy focus on poverty in developing countries, donations to normal EA charities also serve to reduce international racial disparities. The development gap between Africa and the rest of the world is strongly tied to colonial policies designed to enrich European countries at the expense of majority-black countries.
2. If you want to focus on racial discrimination, I'd suggest charities aiming to p...
No worries! I'm always happy to help out. The main things are:
1. It's true that MMT usually recognizes that excess aggregate demand from money printing leads to increases in prices. The main error that MMT makes here is in saying that it is always possible to avoid default by printing money, even if it causes hyperinflation, so that the true constraint on government spending is its willingness to accept inflation, not its ability to continue making interest payments. The Chicago MMT question may have been poorly worded.
2. I think that these obser...
If you want me to summarize the mainstream response to MMT, though, here it is:
It's true that countries don't have to "Pay back" their debt in the sense of going to $0 debt – but then neither do companies, or even people (Think of elderly retirees with reverse mortgages). However, this is very different from saying that there's not a budget constraint on a country's ability to spend. In reality, there are two.
One is savings. A country needs to borrow to finance a deficit. If you have too much debt, you can't find ...
The short answer to this post's title is "No." All of the policies you have described fall under traditional macroeconomic stimulus, of the kind economists have understood since the time of Keynes.
I believe what you've gotten here is a very pop-econ kind of thing that ends up being reported in media, but is a terrible summary of the actual state of knowledge in economics. It's the sort of thing that people who are very smart but haven't specialized in the field will tend to pick up from reading on Wikipedia, which has an unfor...
If you want me to summarize the mainstream response to MMT, though, here it is:
It's true that countries don't have to "Pay back" their debt in the sense of going to $0 debt – but then neither do companies, or even people (Think of elderly retirees with reverse mortgages). However, this is very different from saying that there's not a budget constraint on a country's ability to spend. In reality, there are two.
One is savings. A country needs to borrow to finance a deficit. If you have too much debt, you can't find ...
The empirical track record is that the top 3 AI research labs (Anthropic, DeepMind, and OpenAI) were all started by people worried that AI would be unsafe, who then went on to design and implement a bunch of unsafe AIs.