All of JimmyJ's Comments + Replies

I am writing a post on the effects of this one. If anyone is interested, I will try to finish

I'm interested.

1
adamShimi
4y
Also interested. I did not think about it before, but since the old generation dying is one way scientific and intellectual changes are completely accepted, that would probably have some big impact on our intellectual landscape and culture.
7
Pablo
4y
I'm also interested. Anders Sandberg discusses the issue a bit in one of his conversations with Rob Wiblin for the 80k Podcast.

Metaculus currently gives a 16% chance to the claim that total deaths before 2021 will be greater than 11.6 M.

4
Sean_o_h
4y
I must admit, I would not make the same bet at the same odds on the 27th of February 2020.

Could you please provide the JHU questions and predictions for those of us who don't want to sign up?

I suggest the question you've linked has an artificially low upper bound

The question has an upper bound of 100 million deaths, not cases. I don't think that is "artificially low".

Maybe you are confusing Hurford's link with this old question, which does have an artificially low upper bound and deals with cases instead of deaths.

All metaculus questions are about cases, not deaths.

Most of them are, but the one Hurford linked to is explicitly about the number of deaths: "How many people will die as a result of the 2019 novel coron... (read more)

1
Nathan Young
4y
You are entirely correct. My bad.
Note: despite it being kind of neat (in my humble opinion) to develop such a scoring system, and getting mixed-to-positive feedback about it, I don't seem to have gotten attention from EA or EA-adjacent media, journalists, podcasts, etc.

Have you tried reaching out to anyone?

6
MichaelStJules
4y
kbog, maybe you should reach out to one of the writers for Vox's Future Perfect and ask what you could do to get an article there about your work? I think you'd want to show the scores without weighting/aggregating across issues, and just leave "?" instead of the party priors when there's too little info, since Bayesianism might be too much for a more general audience. Articles ranking candidates on issues are pretty common. One concern, though, is that readers will just use their own values which are not very EA-aligned (less concern for non-Americans, speciesist, less concern for the far future), or you'll have to omit issues which aren't EA enough, and then readers will complain that important issues have been left out. I don't think there's any way to win here, since the readers will have different values. Another possibility is making an alignment quiz like https://www.isidewith.com/political-quiz

The opposite trend occurred for SARS (in the same class as nCoV-2019), which originally had around a 2-5% deaths/cases rate but ended up with >10% once all cases ran their full course.

1
Davidmanheim
4y
SARS was very unusual, and serves as a partial counterexample. On the other hand, the "trend" being shown is actually almost entirely a function of the age groups of the people infected - it was far more fatal in the elderly. With that known now, we have a very reasonable understanding of what occurred - which is that because the elderly were infected more often in countries where SARS reached later, and the countries are being aggregated in this graph, the raw estimate behaved very strangely.

In a comment from October 2019, Ben Pace stated that there is currently no actionable policy advice the AI safety community could give to the President of the United States. I'm wondering to what extent you agree with this.

If the US President or an influential member of Congress was willing to talk one-on-one with you for a couple hours on the issue of AI safety policy, what advice would you give them?

9
Cullen
4y
Hm, I haven't thought about this particular issue a lot. I am more focused on research and industry advocacy right now than government work. I suppose one nice thing would be to have an explicit area of antitrust leniency carved out for cooperations on AI safety.

I skimmed the post, but I couldn't find what this is responding to. Could you provide a link for context?

I believe this is a response to this post.

1
kbog
4y
I didn't share it because they were trying to make ~drama~ and attacking EAs. I just represented their general arguments.
Answer by JimmyJDec 31, 201912
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The founders of PETRL include Daniel Filan, Buck Shlegeris, Jan Leike, and Mayank Daswani, all of whom were students of Marcus Hutter. Brian Tomasik coined the name.

Of these five people, four are busy doing AI safety-related research. (Filan is a PhD student involved with CHAI, Shlegeris works for MIRI, Leike works for DeepMind, and Tomasik works for FRI. OTOH, Daswani works for a cybersecurity company in Australia.)

So, my guess is that they became too busy to work on PETRL, and lost interest. It's kind of a shame, because PETRL was (to my knowledge)... (read more)

4
Brian_Tomasik
4y
There seems to be a lot of academic and popular discussion about robot rights and machine consciousness, but yeah, I can't name offhand another organization explicitly focused on this topic. (To some degree, Sentience Institute has this as a long-run goal, and many organizations care about it as part of what they work on.) There's a spoof organization called People for Ethical Treatment of Robots. Update: I see there's another organization: American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots. On the FAQ page they say:
2
matthew.vandermerwe
4y
Thanks! Exactly the information I wanted.
Answer by JimmyJDec 29, 20195
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I believe kbog's combined model is one of the best attempts yet to analyze the impacts of animal production consumption. You can view his original post announcing the model here, and his most up-to-date version of the model here.

I think that the 2018-12-05 datapoint is wrong because it came from a Quora answer which was later edited. I can't prove this, but it seems likely because the rest of the datapoints are monotonically increasing.

Most of the other data came from FB itself (as documented in the 'raw data' link above), so it should be pretty solid.

Hi, as the person who personally generated the wiki dump, I can assure you that the complete content of every edit revision of every article was saved, and the data is saved in an XML format that can be trivially imported into MediaWiki. Additionally, I grabbed it after site activity had already died down, but before the wiki got taken over by spambots, so the dump should be in pretty much perfect condition.

1
VPetukhov
4y
Oh, sorry, didn't figure it out. Thanks for clarification! Do you by chance know why the old wiki died?

Thanks. By the way, I updated the comment you replied to.

I generated a graph of the number of EA Forum posts per year, as well as the number of new user registrations. I extracted the data using the GraphQL API.

The raw JSON data for all posts is here. I had to split the user data into two files due to upload limits. The raw JSON data for all unbanned (but otherwise unfiltered) users is here. The JSON data for all banned users is here.

Results:

... (read more)
3
Peter Wildeford
5y
Thanks, this is really cool to see. I will follow up next year to add total posts as a metric. I added this idea to FN35.

Regarding the Effective Altruism FB group member growth over time, I was able to piece together the following graph using archived snapshots and various other sources: https://i.imgur.com/Lejj0e1.png

The raw data (including sources for each data point) is available here. If anyone has more comprehensive data, please let me know.

Based on that, I estimate (linearly interpolate) the following member counts for January 1 of each year:

  • 2014: ~1905
  • 2015: ~4535
  • 2016: ~8610
  • 2017: ~11983
  • 2018: ~14119
  • 2019: ~16003

You have the actual data for 2018 and 2019. If you could sha... (read more)

2
JimmyJ
4y
I think that the 2018-12-05 datapoint is wrong because it came from a Quora answer which was later edited. I can't prove this, but it seems likely because the rest of the datapoints are monotonically increasing. Most of the other data came from FB itself (as documented in the 'raw data' link above), so it should be pretty solid.

This is the data moderators of the main FB group have collected about number of members over time: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pOiVv6q2dW6IcEHvGxp4TLKjUtOVkxX6GjqZ_91Vv7E/edit?usp=sharing

4
Peter Wildeford
5y
Wow, can you speak a bit more to how you recovered that data? That's impressive. From my actual stats, It looks like there were 14,398 users at the beginning of 2018 and 15,294 users at the beginning of 2019 which matches your equation pretty well.