All of DanielFilan's Comments + Replies

Since nobody else has responded, my best guess would be "conditional probability table".

In my experience of being an Australian, "fag" is not a common term of endearment I've encountered, except in the sense that general insults are used as terms of endearment (like "shit-for-brains" etc).

Well, maybe. https://manifold.markets/DanielFilan/on-feb-1-2024-will-i-believe-that-o?r=RGFuaWVsRmlsYW4

I guess I should add why I'd like such a BOTEC: I'm broadly skeptical that anti-abortion interventions will turn out to be competitive with animal welfare interventions on a cost-effectiveness basis under the assumption of foetal moral patienthood, given that my impression is that animal welfare has a vastly wider scale (perhaps with exceptions like choosing to not have an abortion or voting for your polity to criminalize abortion).

FWIW I would have appreciated a BOTEC for the cost-effectiveness of various anti-abortion interventions (under the assumption of the wrongness of abortion). You gesture that it's possible to affect the number of abortions via policy, but this is obviously a pretty limited analysis. Absent this sort of BOTEC, this reads as a case for policy-makers to restrict abortion, rather than an effective altruist case for pro-life/anti-abortion advocacy, as your title promises.

Aum intended to kill thousands of people with sarin gas, and produced enough to do so. But they a) were not able to get the gas to a sufficiently high level of purity, and b) had issues with dispersal. In the 1995 Tokyo subway attack, they ended up killing 13 people, far less than the thousands that they intended.

IIRC b) was largely a matter of the people getting nervous and not deploying it in the intended way, rather than a matter of a lack of metis.

Thanks!

No chance there's a ~10 word summary of the executive summary? I'm interested but pretty sleep-deprived/jetlagged and found it hard to interpret the table.

(1) Sorry, I was copy-pasting the formula in the spreadsheet, but missed the extra 0.1 factor you added at the end. First of all, I still think the factor of 50 you're shaving off due to diminishing marginal returns seems quite extreme, given the lack of articulable justification for why it should be so big. I guess the extra factor of 10 is because diet cola exists? I'm not sure why you're adding that - as I mentioned, the questions you asked people already mentioned that people could substitute to diet sodas. Quoting from the instructions to participants... (read more)

Beyond potential a prior scepticism as to whether such a significant number of people not dying or suffering ill health from diabetes really is less valuable than loss of freedom to drink sugar drinks

I guess I want to add something here about why one would have the opposite prior: by and large, a decent model of people is that when they make decisions, they roughly weigh costs and benefits to themselves (or follow a policy that they adopted when weighing costs and benefits). Diabetes is mostly a cost to oneself. At least in the US, people are broadly aw... (read more)

Then, using the y=x^0.1 formula, we take (1-d)^0.1 to find that 98% of "freedom of choice" still remains, and correspondingly, there was a 2% reduction.

The number in the sheet is a 0.2% reduction, not a 2% reduction. [EDIT: my bad, it's a 2% reduction, there's just another factor of 10 reduction that I mistakenly lumped into that]

• I still disagree with your belief that the accuracy of the iterated questions format was lower than the accuracy of the fraction of income format - both questions had standard deviations that were approximately the same multiple of their means.
• I think your original strategy of aggregating across the population using the arithmetic mean made sense, and don't understand what the justification is supposed to be for replacing it with a geometric mean [1]. Concretely, imagine a decision that affects two friends lives, making one 50% worse, and the other 0.005

also noticed that there are a number of issues – probability of success, and also substitution with diet coke – which should be factored in

Just reread this - surely these don't need to be factored in? Probability of success affects the numerator and the denominator equally, and your poll respondents probably already knew about diet coke.

(1) Fair enough re sample (altho it obviously limits how much of a conclusion you can draw). Re: the different variances, I basically dispute that the cash value method has a meaningfully lower variance than the hypothetical sequence method, because the relevant error is relevant to the mean. That said, this factor of 3 is the smallest issue I have with your calculation.

(2) Could you show the calculations (perhaps in a simplified format, like I did)? The tax vs ban seems like it should affect the value of freedom similarly to how it affects the disease bur... (read more)

Sounds like you roughly agree with me - 8.1 / 3.5 = 230%, which is close to 167%. Difference is I use the 5% reduction number for proportion of burden due to sugary drinks, getting 90 mil / 20 = 4.5 mil, 8.1 / 4.5 = 180%, and the rest is error built into these calcs.

Wait: your survey numbers are for DALYs lost per year. So if the disease burden is 90 million DALYs per year, banning sugary drinks gives a benefit of 0.0006 DALYs per person-year, compared to 0.001 DALYs lost per person-year, meaning that the loss of freedom reduces the benefit by 167% (or 500% if you believe this comment). So now I'm really curious how your adjustments are bringing that down so much.

FWIW I'm also suspicious of the 0.001 DALYs per person number.

AFAICT, the way you get it is by combining two methods: method 1 is to ask people a chain of questions like "as a fraction of death, how bad is life imprisonment", "as a fraction of life imprisonment, how bad is not being able to eat tasty stuff", "as a fraction of not being able to eat tasty stuff, how bad is not being able to have sugary drinks", multiply their answers to get how bad losing sugary drinks is as a fraction of dying, and then multiply by the fraction 64/74 (for remaining life yea... (read more)

Let me try to do a rough calculation myself: if you world-wide banned sugary drinks, each person would lose 0.001 DALYs total over the rest of their lives [EDIT: this is wrong, it's per annum, see this comment for a corrected version of the following calculation].

What's the disease burden caused by DMT2? Your report says roughly 90 million DALYs, I'm going to assume that's per year (you probably say this somewhere or it's probably an obvious convention, but I couldn't find it easily and don't know the conventions in this field). The global average age is ~... (read more)

OK I'm really confused - you calculate ~0.001 DALYs (which i guess is ~9 disability-adjusted life-hours) lost per person to eliminating people's freedom to consume sugary drinks, adjust that down because you're not eliminating it but just restricting it, make a second adjustment which I don't understand but which I'll assume is OK, multiply by the population of the average country to get a total number of DALYs, then:

Fourthly and finally, we divide by overall diabetes mellitus type 2 disease burden, thus creating an estimate -0.001% to be used as a downw

Also in cell 1F of the results spreadsheet, "salty food" should be "sugary drinks".

Who are the 16 people you surveyed to determine the disvalue of reducing people's freedom to buy sugary drinks?

[EDITED TO ADD: this comment burys the lede a bit, in a great-grandchild I do some napkin math that, if correct, indicates that the survey results mean that the reduced value of freedom entirely negates the health benefits]

we don't use superintelligent singletons and probably won't, I hope. We instead create context limited model instances of a larger model and tell it only about our task and the model doesn't retain information.

FYI, current cutting-edge large language models are trained on a massive amount of text on the internet (in the case of GPT-4, likely approximately all the text OpenAI could get their hands on). So they certainly have tons of information about stuff other than the task at hand.

I asked Alex "no chance you can comment on whether you think assistance games are mostly irrelevant to modern deep learning?"

His response was "i think it's mostly irrelevant, yeah, with moderate confidence". He then told me he'd lost his EA forum credentials and said I should feel free to cross-post his message here.

(For what it's worth, as people may have guessed, I disagree with him - I think you can totally do CIRL-type stuff with modern deep learning, to the extent you can do anything with modern deep learning.)

The core argument of Nick Bostrom’s bestselling book Superintelligence has also aged quite poorly: In brief, the book mostly assumed we will manually program a set of values into an AGI, and argued that since human values are complex, our value specification will likely be wrong, and will cause a catastrophe when optimized by a superintelligence. But most researchers now recognize that this argument is not applicable to modern ML systems which learn values, along with everything else, from vast amounts of human-generated data.

For what it's worth, the bo... (read more)

Stuart Russell’s “assistance game” research agenda, started in 2016, is now widely seen as mostly irrelevant to modern deep learning— see former student Rohin Shah’s review here, as well as Alex Turner’s comments here.

The second link just takes me to Alex Turner's shortform page on LW, where ctrl+f-ing "assistance" doesn't get me any results. I do find this comment when searching for "CIRL", which criticizes the CIRL/assistance games research program, but does not claim that it is irrelevant to modern deep learning. For what it's worth, I think it's pla... (read more)

Sorry, maybe this is addressed elsewhere, but what relationship have you had with Nonlinear?

I suppose it's relevant if you want to get a sense of the chances of ending up in a situation reminiscent of the one depicted in this post if you work for Nonlinear.

FWIW my intuition is that even if it's permissible to illegally transport life-saving medicines, you shouldn't pressure your employee to do so. Anyway I've set up a twitter poll, so we'll see what others think.

I believe there is a reasonable risk should EAs... [d]ate coworkers, especially when there is a power differential and especially when there is a direct report relationship

I think you're right that there's some risk in these situations. But also: work is one of the main places where one is able to meet people, including potential romantic partners. Norms against dating co-workers therefore seem quite costly in lost romance, which I think is a big deal! I think it's probably worth having norms against the cases you single out as especially risky, but otherwise, I'd rather our norms be laissez-faire.

For example some countries ban homosexuality, but your typical American would not consider it blameworthy to be gay.

I would object to my employer asking me to be homosexual.

Are you factoring in that CEA pays a few hundred bucks per attendee? I'd have a high-ish bar to pay that much for someone to go to a conference myself. Altho I don't have a good sense of what the marginal attendee/rejectee looks like.

Definitely more plausible, but as a rule, "whenever you engage in some risky activity, you should do it to the standards of the top organizations who do it" doesn't seem a priori plausible.

Would this post meet the standards of investigative journalism that's typically published in mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Economist?

I'm not exactly sure what this means, not being aware of what those standards are. It does strike me that IIUC those venues typically attempt to cover issues of national or international importance (or in the case of the NYT and WaPo, issues of importance to New York City or Washington, DC), and that's probably the wrong bar for importance for whether someone should publish something on the EA forum or LessWrong.

Anyway, hope these responses satisfy your curiosity!

Does the piece conform to accepted journalist standards in terms of truth, balance, open-mindedness, context-sensitivity, newsworthiness, credibility of sources, and avoidance of libel? (Or is it a biased article that presupposed its negative conclusions, aka a 'hit piece', 'takedown', or 'hatchet job').

As a consumer of journalism, it strikes me that different venues have different such standards, so I'm not really sure what your first question is supposed to mean. Regarding your parenthetical, I think presupposing negative (or positive!) conclusions is to be avoided, and I endorse negatively judging pieces that do that.

Does the piece offer a coherent narrative that's clearly organized according to a timeline of events, interactions, claims, counter-claims, and outcomes?

I think organization is a virtue, but not a must for a piece to be accurate or worth reading.

Does the piece show 'scope-sensitivity' in accurately judging the relative badness of different actions by different people and organizations, in terms of which things are actually trivial, which may have been unethical but not illegal, and which would be prosecutable in a court of law?

This strikes me as a good standard.

Did the author give the key targets of their negative coverage sufficient time and opportunity to respond to their allegations, and were their responses fully incorporated into the resulting piece, such that the overall content and tone of the coverage was fair and balanced?

Given the prominence of the comments sections in the venues where this piece has been published, I'd say allowing the targets to comment satisfies the value expressed by this. At any rate, I do think it's good to incorporate responses from the targets of the coverage (as was done her... (read more)

Were the anonymous sources credible? Did they have any personal or professional incentives to make false allegations? Are they mentally healthy, stable, and responsible?

I think the first two questions make sense as good criteria (altho criteria that are hard to judge externally). As for the last question, I think somebody could be depressed and routinely show up late to events while still being a good anonymous source, altho for some kinds of mental unhealth, instability, and irresponsibility, I see how they could be disqualifying.

Does the author have

Does the author have any personal relationship to any of their key sources? Any personal or professional conflicts of interest? Any personal agenda? Was their payment of money to anonymous sources appropriate and ethical?

These seem like reasonable questions to ask. I whole-heartedly agree that such amateur journalists should only make payments that are appropriate and ethical - in fact, this strikes me as tautological.

Did they 'run it by legal', in terms of checking for potential libel issues?

If Ben wants to assume liability for libel lawsuits, I don't see why he should be prevented from doing so. In the domain of professional investigative journalism, I can see why a company would have this standard, since the company may not want to be held liable for things an individual journalist rashly said, but that strikes me as inapplicable in this case.

(Incidentally, it seems like this is probably a standard of professional investigative journalism that I don't think amateur investigative journalism should attempt to adhere to)

Did the author have any appropriate oversight, in terms of an editor ensuring that they were fair and balanced, or a fact-checking team that reached out independently to verify empirical claims, quotes, and background context?

I think it's fine to attempt to do these sorts of things yourself, as long as you don't make serious errors, and as long as you correct errors that pop up along the way.

So, you don't think amateur investigative journalism should even try to adhere to the standards of professional investigative journalism?

That's not what I said. I said "I think it's fine to investigate something and write up your conclusions without having training as an investigative journalist" in response to the first thing you proposed as a way to evaluate the piece: "Does the author have any training, experience, or accountability as an investigative journalist, so they can avoid the most common pitfalls, in terms of journalist ethics, due diligenc... (read more)

I disagree with that conclusion. For example, I think it's fine to investigate something and write up your conclusions without having training as an investigative journalist, even if your conclusions make someone else look bad.

I think the idea is that it was in a draft but got edited out last-minute? That seems to be corroborated by Ben's comment.

From another perspective, Ben has chosen to "search for negative information about the Nonlinear cofounders" and then - without inviting or even permitting the accused party to share their side of the story in advance - share it in a public space full of agents whose tendency to gossip is far stronger than their tendency to update in an appropriately Bayesian manner (i.e. human beings).

I'm confused - wouldn't you consider the "Conversation with Nonlinear" section to be letting the accused party share their side of the story in advance?

My guess is that it's this paper. The abstract/introduction:

If competitive equilibrium is defined as a situation in which prices are such that all arbitrage profits are eliminated, is it possible that a competitive economy always be in equilibrium? Clearly not, for then those who arbitrage make no (private) return from their (privately) costly activity. Hence the assumptions that all markets, including that for information, are always in equilibrium and always perfectly arbitraged are inconsistent when arbitrage is costly.

We propose here a model in which

They also paid for naming rights to various stadiums, I could imagine a similar thing with the Met (a gallery for FTX-traded NFTs?)

I wonder if "the CEA forum" would work? Low edit distance, gives the idea that it's related to EA while not necessarily representing all of it. Downside is that it works less well if CEA changes their name.

FYI to LW old-timers, "MoreRight" evokes the name of a neo-reactionary blog that grew out of the LW community. But I don't think it's a thing anymore?

Things like getting funding, being highly upvoted on the forum, being on podcasts, being high status and being EA-branded are fuzzy and often poor proxies for trustworthiness and of relevant people’s views on the people, projects and organizations in question.

To flesh this out a bit: I run an EA-adjacent podcast (the AI X-risk Research Podcast, tell your friends). I decide to have people on if, based on a potentially-shallow understanding of their work, I think it would be good if people understood their ideas better. Ways this can be true:

1. I think the

Note that if you take observations of tic-tac-toe superintelligent ANI (plays the way we know it would play, we can tie with it if we play first), then of AlphaZero chess, then of top go bots, and extrapolate out along the dimension of how rich the strategy space of the domain is (as per Eliezer's comment), I think you get a different overall takeaway than the one in this post.