All of Douglas Knight's Comments + Replies

You should probably think of Moore's law as having a logarithmic x-axis as well. It can be transformed to an instance of Wright's law that the graph of log cost as a function of log aggregate production is a straight line. Moore's law of exponential improvement in time is fueled by exponential expansion of demand in time. 

The proportion of silicon devoted to LLMs has run through a logistic curve and is now a substantial proportion of production, so it can't keep growing. But the total production of chips has been growing exponentially for decades and ... (read more)

The post mixes together several topics. If you want to write a better post, "What I wish Applied Divinity Studies had written," you should do so. But my comment is a response to the actual post, which may well be an intentional conflation.

Does anyone care that FTX failed? They care that it stole. A complete fraud like Theranos only destroyed a billion dollars of investor money. Whereas a bank like FTX has access not only to investor money, but also to much more money in the form of deposits from people who don't think they're making an investment in a risky start up.

Gates has more money than he knows what to do with. If he wants to spend another hundred billion, he could just donate it himself. He doesn't have quite as much money outside the foundation as Buffet, but almost. Donating to Gates has zero value. Maybe spending on militias has negative value, but so do most of these foundations.

Donating to Gates was a bad idea 20 years ago. Maybe there was some option value that he would think of a way to spend the money, but he didn't. Gates should have tried to convince Buffet to donate not his money but his time, his expertise in management. Maybe he tried, but he failed 20 years ago and today changes nothing.

There’s no good reason to think that GiveWell’s top charities are net harmful.

Blanket deworming is a Pascal wager. GiveWell's assessment is that the small number of studies are probably wrong, but the claimed effect is so big that it's worth trying. Net of this zero effect, you must subtract the cost: drugs so awful they cause riots. GiveWell does not attempt to measure this cost. Maybe you accept the gamble, but this item seems worded to avoid that framing. Or maybe you drop the huge income effects and retreat to the health effects. How many children shou... (read more)

There are two separate questions here. (1) Why has society not adopted this over decades and (2) Why do EA people who promote far-UVC not also promote the old technology? The second question has a precise answer.

The patents all expired by 2016, so this contradicts your claim.

I think this was wrong. I don't know where I heard the story about Clinton negotiating price discrimination, but, actually, generics already existed in 2001 before either PEPFAR or Clinton started buying. PEPFAR simply refused to use them because it wasn't actually about saving lives. It switched in 2006 because it was embarrassed by Clinton and WHO using them.

Oster seemed to be aware that PEPFAR was paying 10x as much as WHO, as she writes "Even at generic drug prices." It is a travesty that she didn't draw attention to this.

PEPFAR wasn't a humanitarian p... (read more)

Where do you get the claim about ARVs?

How do you know how many people got treatment? I don't see any numbers in this post or its sources.

Herd immunity is a threshold effect. Since the analyses (correctly!) said that few people would receive treatment, it doesn't matter whether the treatment stopped spread, it would have only small effect on the analysis.

Is there any reason to believe that PEPFAR brought prices down? Why not count Clinton lobbying for price discrimination as economists getting this 100% right? If economists missed the importance of R&D, that's bad, but was it important, or was it just about releasing patents?

So if you intuit that we can do better than peer review, I would recommend getting a PhD in economics under a highly-respected supervisor, and learn how to investigate institutions like peer review (against proposed alternatives!) with a level of rigor that satisfies high-prestige economists.

Wow, that's really specific. Are you trying to evoke Robin Hanson? Before following him, ask him if it's a good idea. I think he regrets his path.

The NYT may be an outlier among papers, but this instance is not an outlier of the NYT approach.

That she is honest is evidence that it was an honest mistake. That she is careful is evidence that it was not.

Another trusted party signing data is mail providers (DKIM), in particular mail sent through Google is signed. Google can't repudiate these signatures, but you have to trust them not to write new history. Matthew Green calls for the opposite: for Google to publish its old private keys to destroy this information.

My guess is that this is the June figure for the FTX Future Fund grant commitments. The current figure is $160M as of September 1st. Some of these grants were in installments, especially the multi-year ones, and not all of the money was transferred. This Fund was "longtermist" and I do not see a dollar figure on other FTX charitable giving. This does not include $500M in equity in Anthropic.

Added, weeks later: Or maybe he got it from NYT:

As recently as last month, the umbrella FTX Foundation said it had given away $140 million, of which $90 million went th

Robinhood allowed leverage, but I don't think that had anything to do with the crisis.

Warren Buffett (following Ted Turner) funded the project that is the most impressive example of just throwing money at a problem: buying ex-Soviet nuclear material. Most of the credit should go to Nunn and Lugar, but if we're talking about scalability and what billionaires can do, this should be exhibit A.

Suggestion:

Distinguish or isolate the intro and conclusion about the Nonlinear Library from the main content. 

Ideally, use a different voice (eg, a human recording). A common solution is to insert a chime. Either of those would require splicing audio files. If you want to keep to just splicing text files, maybe there's a way of inserting something to make the TTL pause?

It may be hard to compare art from different periods, but it is direct to compare science and engineering from different periods because the same thing was discovered or invented multiple times.

Knowledge is not a ratchet. Sometimes knowledge is lost. But it is not only catastrophes like burning libraries and riots against scholars. There are Leaden Ages where scientific knowledge is lost century after century, such as Alexandria for about five centuries starting  150AD. Any period of progress is a Golden Age compared to that. Do people know that they ... (read more)