All of Kevin_Cornbob's Comments + Replies
Kind of nerdy point, but I think the 0.8 effect size is likely inflated. A recent analysis of the meta-analyses on psychotherapy for depression found that the average summary effect size for meta-analyses was 0.56.
There seemed to be evidence for publication bias:
Meta-analyses that excluded high risk of bias studies, mean g=0.61, 95% CI (0.27, 0.95) with k=2413 included samples, produced larger effect size estimates than meta-analyses including only low risk of bias studies, mean g=0.45, 95% CI (0.19, 0.72) with k=1034.
Also, many studies used improper...
My understanding is that the technical translation is: 70% of the variance in that trait is attributable to genes, given the time and place of the studied population.
For example, 70% of the variance in intelligence is attributable to genes, given a white American population, living in non-abusive homes, from the 1960s to the 1990s. (The specifics are just to provide a concrete example.)
The farther one gets from the originally studied population, the less one can extrapolate exact findings. And vice versa.
It is not clear to me that taking action on non-extinction x-risks would be in conflict with neartermist goals:
Value lockin -> like an AI singleton locking in a scenario that would not be optimal for longtermist goals? Isn't that akin to the alignment problem, and so directly intertwined with extinction risk?
Irreversible technological regression -> wouldn't this be incredibly bad for present humans and so coincide with neartermist goals?
Any discrete event that prevents us from reaching technological maturity -> wouldn't this essentially translate ...
Fwiw, I don't think a crash in the FTT token would've crashed FTX as a business (assuming no funny business with extending loans to other parties collateralized in FTT). Afaik FTT was basically a revenue-share token, essentially like common stock.
Just as Meta shares falling 70% didn't affect their core business of showing users ads, a crash in FTT shouldn't have affected the core exchange business. It's just the going rate for rights to future profits.
A relevant Twitter thread by Dustin Moskovitz:
Two seemingly contradictory things I believe about the SBF situation:
a/ The Effective Altruism community will need to have a strong response/crucible moment
b/ The simplest explanation for his behavior does not imply utilitarianism means-justifying, as widely assumed.
I think the quotes from Sam's blog are very interesting and are pretty strong evidence for the view that Sam's thinking and actions were directly influenced by some EA ideas.
I think the thinking around EA leadership is way too premature and presumptive. There are many years (like a decade?) of EA leadership generally being actually good people and not liars. There are also explicit calls in "official" EA sources that specifically say that the ends do not justify the means in practice, honesty and integrity are important EA values, and pluralism and m...
I just wanted to note that I agree with everything you've said here.
Edit: This is kinda whatever but I guess I'm getting downvoted for agreeing here? There is no agree vote for the OP, so the only way I can differentiate between upvoting because I thought it was high quality vs actually agreeing with the post is by commenting...
I may be overpleading the case here, but I feel like a big reason why there is default skepticism about crypto is that in most people's minds, they think "crypto" equals "bitcoin".
Bitcoin makes up a plurality of total crypto market cap, but imo it's generally boring, uninteresting, and not a particularly high potential part of the space. If crypto was just bitcoin, I wouldn't think that highly of it either. Bitcoin may still be able serve as a kind of "digital gold", but that seems overall not that net positive or interesting.
Imo by far the most inte...
Right, I'm trying to say - just like normal fiat currency, crypto is meant to be a money, it's not an end in itself. So using the bar "I wouldn't buy this thing if I couldn't then trade it for something else" doesn't really make sense, because the whole point of the thing is that you can eventually trade it for something else.
The value in money is in its properties to facilitate store of value, unit of account, and unit of exchange. Crypto in principal can do these things.
Also, insofar as there is value in other blockchain based applications (e.g. De...
Cryptocurrency is meant to be a form of money, so I think the following quote doesn't really make sense as a bar:
I cannot think of a single application of cryptocurrency where it's worth spending money on something if I then know for certain I can then never sell it.
Would you spend dollars for euros if you then knew for certain you could never "sell" ( i.e. trade it for something else) your euros? The only difference in principal is that crypto is backed by math and cryptography rather than government enforcement.
More practically, as Habryka no...
Here's a quote from former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers in a recent Bloomberg interview that backs up some of the claims in this comment:
...A lot of people have compared this to Lehman. I would compare it to Enron - the smartest guys in the room, not just financial error, but certainly from the reports, whiffs of fraud. Stadium namings very early in a company's history. Vast explosion of wealth that nobody quite understands where it comes from.
[...] I think this is probably less about the complexities of the nuances of the rules of crypto r
Counterpoint to "had one looked into SBF activities with due diligence in mind, questionable behavior would be obvious to see":
Many high profile VC firms invested in FTX (e.g. Sequoia, SoftBank, BlackRock). They raised at astronomical valuations as recently as January of this year. It seems unlikely to me that any due diligence into the inner workings of the business by EA higher-ups would have come up with something that these VCs apparently did not.
OTOH, I've been following crypto closely for a little over a year now and I had heard rum...
Counterpoint to this: a lot of VC investments in crypto were very dodgy. I can't recall exact project names, but I remember regularly seeing news of the form "a16z just backed us with 300M!" on projects which are clearly zero-sum and don't have the market cap to generate >300M in fees, like blockchain games. VC investment doesn't seem like as strong a signal in the crypto space as in other spaces.
Hi Howie,
I really wasn't expecting a reply from an 80K staff member so I really appreciate taking time out to give myself and other readers more context. FWIW, I think generally the moves you describe make sense.
On "In our experience, these people aren't 'wandering in the dark;'" - this is just anecdotal evidence but I'd like to push back on that a bit: That phrase might be a bit of an exaggeration but I think personally in my own case and in a number of EAs I've come across, a 20-60 min session with an expert cou...
I think part of what might be driving the difference of opinion here is that the type of EAs that need a 45 minute chat are not the type of EAs that 80k meets. If you work at 80k, you and most of the EAs you know: probably have dozens of EA friends, have casual conversations about EA, pick up informal knowledge easily, and can talk out your EA ideas with people who can engage. But the majority of people who call themselves EA probably don't have many if any friends who work at EA organizations, donate lots, provide informal knowledge of EA, or who c...
Just wanted to say I appreciate this post and I feel you. I had a very similar feeling when applying to receive coaching from 80K. I think they've improved their message since I applied, but at the time I didn't fully realize the type of person they were taking was literally the going to Harvard, in the middle of a machine learning Phd type.
I also feel like generally there's a huge under-utilization of talent in EA. I see so many cases of smart, motivated people who may not have literally the best resume ever, but could be extremely helpful...
Hi Kevin,
Howie from 80k here. Note that I'm just one staff member and don't speak on behalf of the whole team, but I wanted to give some thoughts on your comment.
First of all, I appreciate the feedback and I’m sorry to hear that you had a frustrating experience applying for coaching from 80k. Unfortunately, we can only work with a small fraction of the people who apply. Our current coaching page tries to make this clear and I apologize if we’ve done a bad job communicating this (either currently or in the past).
I understand that this situation m...
It's practically impossible to exactly predict how future technology will shape out, but intuitively I think if there's ANY significant chance whatsoever of blockchain being the next internet, or anything close, it would be massively positive EV to try to shape that for the better. Imagine if an EA person was the head of Facebook for example? It could be absolutely huge, even if simply from an earning to give perspective.
With all the uncertainty here and the obviousness of other causes, I don't know if this should be high on the list of all priorities for...
It's true that the first mover often fails, but I also think it's clear that there seems to be a window of opportunity early on which gets harder to get through over time. For example, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon were all around before the dotcom bust. And while Facebook wasn't the first social network, it seems to have gotten to such strong network effects that it's likely to crush any challenger (as it's currently successfully doing to Snapchat). Surely most of the current blockchains will fail (I mean there's over 1000 of them), but it's very possible someone has already built an improved version that can be mainstreamed.
Thought it might be useful to quickly go through that article's counterpoints (I'm basically making the bull case):
The title - it's misleading to use the ten years figure as serious development has only occurred in the past few years. For example, Ethereum, often referred to as Blockchain 2.0, went live in 2015.
Payments and Banking - Comparing to cash is silly as cash can't be sent across the globe instantly. It's like comparing writing letters to email. On comparisons to Visa - it's true in developed countries with strong banking the use case is not obvi...
The claim in the OP was not that crypto's wealth is currently less centralized, it was that crypto could lead to a massive redistribution/creation of wealth in general. And that if EAs could get involved, that could lead to a more even distribution of wealth on the whole.
It's also misleading to use strong European states' income numbers as a comparison. My understanding is that those are among the countries with the most equal societies and using income numbers is always more equal than using wealth numbers because rich people tend to have a large amount of assets which count as wealth but not income. For example, in America the top 1/10 of 1% hold more wealth than the bottom 60% of Americans.
My intuition after playing around with many of these models is that GPT 3.5 is probably not good enough at general reasoning to produce consistent results. It seems likely to me that either GPT 4 or Claude 2 would be good enough. FWIW, in a recent video Nathan Labenz said that he originally suggested to use GPT 4 and then go from there when people asked him for recommendations. The analysis gets more complicated with Claude 2 (perhaps slightly worse at reasoning, longer context window).