Karthik Tadepalli
Bio
I research a wide variety of issues relevant to global health and development. I also consult as a researcher for GiveWell (but nothing I say on the Forum is ever representative of GiveWell). I'm always happy to chat - if you think we have similar interests and would like to talk, send me a calendar invite at karthikt@berkeley.edu!
Posts 16
Comments501
It's clearly not the case that asteroid monitoring is the only or even a highly prioritised intervention among longtermists. That makes it uncompelling to defend longtermism with an argument in which the specific case of asteroid monitoring is a crux.
If your argument is true, why don't longtermists actually give a dollar to asteroid monitoring efforts in every decision situation involving where to give a dollar?
I certainly agree that you're right about describing why people diversify but I think the interesting challenge is to try and understand under what conditions this behavior is optimal.
You're hinting at a bargaining microfoundation, where diversification can be justified as the solution arrived at by a group of agents bargaining over how to spend a shared pot of money. I think that's fascinating and I would explore that more.
Maximizing a linear objective always leads to a corner solution. So to get an optimal interior allocation, you need to introduce nonlinearity somehow. Different approaches to this problem differ mainly in how they introduce and justify nonlinear utility functions. To me I can't see where the nonlinearity is introduced in your framework. That makes me suspect the credence-weighted allocation you derive is not actually the optimal allocation even under model uncertainty. Am I missing something?
Thanks for the link to your thoughts on why you think it's likely that there will be a crash. I think you underestimate the likelihood of the US government propping up AI companies. Just because they didn't invest money in the Stargate expansion doesn't mean they aren't reserving the option to do so later if necessary. It seems clear that Elon Musk is personally very invested in AI. Even aside from his personal involvement the fact that China/DeepSeek is in the mix points towards even a normal government offering strong support to American companies in this race.
If you believe that the US government will prop up AI companies to virtually any level they might realistically need by 2029, then i don't see a crash happening.
IQ grew over the entire 20th century (Flynn effect). Even if it's declining now, it is credulous to take a trend over a few decades and extrapolate it to millennia from today. Especially when that trend of a few decades is itself a reversal of an even longer trend.
Compare this to other trends that we extrapolate out for millennia – increases in life expectancy and income. These are much more robust. Income has been steadily increasing since the Industrial Revolution and life expectancy possibly for even longer than that. That doesn't make extrapolation watertight by any means, but it's a way stronger foundation.
Also, I don't know much about the social context for this article that you say is controversial, but it strikes me as really weird to say "here's an empirical fact that might have moral implications, but EAs won't acknowledge it because its taboo and they're not truthseeking enough". That's putting the cart a few miles before the horse.
Skeptic says "longtermism is false because premises X don't hold in case Y." Defender says "maybe X doesn't hold for Y, but it holds for case Z, so longtermism is true. And also Y is better than Z so we prioritize Y."
What is being proven here? The prevailing practice of longtermism (AI risk reduction) is being defended by a case whose premises are meaningfully different from the prevailing practice. It feels like a motte and bailey.