All of Larks's Comments + Replies

Nitpick: I think this is a linkpost not a repost since this is the first time it has been shared on the forum.

Answer by LarksMar 28, 2024-4
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Ask him how many people he has killed.

(partly but not entirely a joke)

Could you explain which parts you thought were 'thoughtful' and 'great' ?

8
Arden
18h
Appreciate the question, Larks, & wish I'd noted this initially! (Aside/caveat: I'm a bit pressed for time so not responding as fully as I'd like but I'll do my best to make time to expand in the coming days.) "great" I think a lot of criticisms of EA as applied highlight specific incidents of a miscalculation or a person who did something objectionable. But I think Leif made an effort to show these shortfalls to be a pattern, as opposed to one of incidents. And, as a result, I'm currently trying to figure out if there is indeed a pattern of shortcomings, what those patterns are, and how to update or reform or what to do in light of them.  I'm tentatively leaning toward thinking there are some patterns, thanks to Leif and others, but I feel pretty clueless about the last bit (updates/reforms/actions).  "thoughtful" Technically, "thoughtfully" was in reference to Poverty is No Pond. :) The above re pattern of shortcomings was the main reason I linked the piece. And, more importantly, I want to brainstorm with y'all (& Leif) how to update or reform or what to do in light of any patterns of shortcomings. I do think the article's style & snark undercuts Leif's underlying thoughtfulness. When I chatted with him (just once for an hour) a few weeks ago, he showed the upmost kindness, earnestness, & thoughtfulness, with no snark (though I was aware that this post would be tonally different).   Unrequested rhetorical analysis: All the snark does make me feel his primary rhetorical purpose was to discourage talented, thoughtful, well-intentioned young people from engaging with EA, as opposed to change the minds of those already engaging with EA (& likely frequenting this forum). idk maybe I'll come to endorse this aim in the future but in the past I definitely haven't, as evidenced by the hundreds of hours I've spent community building.  So, to clarify, discouraging awesome people from engaging with EA was not my rhetorical purpose in this linkpost. Rather, it was t

Also, if Wytham were a legally separate entity, pretty detailed information would have to be released as a matter of course on Charity Commission filing (UK) or on the Form 990 (US). So, I don't think I view asking for ~ that level of information separated out for a financially significant project as a huge departure from normal practice.

This seems like a pretty weak argument to me. If Apple was to spin off its Apple Watch business as a separate publicly traded company, that new firm would have to release pretty detailed financial information. But because ... (read more)

8
Jason
20h
I don't think that's a particularly good analogy. No one can buy stock in "Apple Watch," only in undivided Apple. In contrast, EVF has presented itself more as a collection of projects that (e.g.,) fundraise as projects for their own work, not as part of one big EVF fundraising appeal that is split up based on centralized EVF preferences. I think the better analogy would be Harvard, which likewise expects its tubs (high-level administrative units, like the law school) "to be self-financing: to prepare its own budgets, raise its own funds, and keep itself solvent." Even though each tub has no separate legal identity, it would strike me (and I suspect most donors) as rather odd if Harvard only released significant financial information at the level of the Harvard Corporation. [https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2004/05/harvard-a-to-z-html]

I think EAs spend a lot of time thinking about things. They think about things because EAs want to be smart, and smart people spend lots of time thinking. That’s why EAs make enourmous google docs, substacks, tweet a lot, go on forums and become researchers.

This seems false to me. People spend a lot of time thinking about things because they want to come to the right answer, not because they are cargo-culting what smart people do. In fact EAs probably spend more time thinking about things than typical smart people do.

2
Rebecca
3d
That wasn’t my interpretation of this section. I took “be smart” to mean like ‘make smart career decisions’, not ‘be Smart^TM’
Larks
5d20
3
0
2

How many talks are you expecting to have? These seem very prescriptive, and things like multiple 1% categories will be difficult to achieve if you have <100 talks. I would worry that a strict focus on distribution like this would lead to having to sacrifice quality.

I think a place where there is a disconnect is that these PF basically think being EA-aligned means you have to be a major pain in the ass to your grantees.

The more I think about this, the more strange it seems to me. At least for the grant-making processes I'm familiar with, there is very little burden on the applicants/grantees. They will in a short (by the standards of grant applications) form that indicates what information is required, maybe answer a few follow-up questions (or maybe not) and then get the money with very few follow-ups. In contrast my... (read more)

For people not clicking through the first link, I thought this youtube video was pretty impressive: almost a hundred years of leading politicians claiming that each election is the or one of the most important elections of our lives / the century / all time.

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Jeff Kaufman
6d
Good illustration! I'd be curious how many people saying 2024 is the most important will in 2028 think 2024 was more important? I did like the 1:32 bit where Obama says "this is... certainly the most important election in my lifetime". Which I take to be him making fun of this trope.
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more better
7d
Thanks for sharing a summary of the content in addition to the link! Super helpful as I do not have streaming right now and am trying to avoid hyperlinks. It makes sense that politicians would say this kind of thing leading up to an election. However, the futures that these 2 candidates are proposing are wildly different. I know that I am not alone (neither here on the forum nor IRL) in believing that this election will be a tipping point and will have implications that ripple far beyond just the US.

I have had cybersecurity issues and have been advised to be more careful about clicking on unfamiliar links and to avoid certain forums. 

Someone told you not to go on lesswrong for cybersecurity reasons?

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more better
7d
That was my interpretation, though the specific forums in question were not named directly so I cannot be certain.

Would it be possible to analogously execute adults by injection into the heart if this was a more humane method?

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Henry Howard
10d
Sounds very difficult when deadly drugs like fentanyl, midazolam and propofol can easily be injected through an intravenous line. You can't get an IV line on a baby in-utero, I think that's why injection into the heart is done in that case.

This is very interesting, I hadn't heard of TBP before, thanks for sharing.

I'm surprised you think that low, especially considering the President often will have been a Senator or Governor or top businessman before office, so the longer average term in Congress is not a big advantage. 

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Owen Cotton-Barratt
14d
I think I was leaning into making my guess sound surprising there, and I had in mind something closer to 100 than 30; it might have been better to represent it as "about 100" or ">50" or something. The fact that presidential terms are just 4 or 8 years does play into my thinking. For sure, they've typically done other meaningful stuff, but I don't think that typically has such a high impact ratio as their years as president. I generated my ratio by querying my brain for snap judgements about how big a deal it would seem to have [some numbers of presidents] [do a thing over their career] vs [some fraction of congress]. Anyway I could certainly be wrong here. I think it's possible I'm underestimating how big is the impact of having the mouthpiece of the presidency.

For instance, most people will probably put the US president into the category “high-impact individual.” And there are certainly many impactful things the president can do that are not accessible to most other people. But for achieving most goals that can be said to really matter - a better healthcare system that actually improves wellbeing in the country; effective technology policy that actually reduces risks and/or advances life-improving technological developments; a sufficient response to the climate crisis; etc. - presidents themselves will tell you

... (read more)
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Owen Cotton-Barratt
14d
FWIW my guess is that if you compare (lifetime impact of president):(lifetime impact of average member of congress), the ratio would be <100 (but >30).

I guess it helps balance out the denouncement posts.

6
Sean_o_h
16d
I quite liked it, but I'd happily give up praise posts if it meant not having the denouncement posts. 

I would prefer the US be stronger relative to its adversaries (Russia, China etc.) so the direct effects of working in defense seem positive to me.

Thanks for writing this, a pleasure to read as always.

I must admit I come away being rather confused by what you mean by 'wholesomeness'. Is wholesomeness basically consequentialism but with more vibes and less numbers? Your account makes it seem quite close to consequentialism. It also seems really close to virtue ethics - you try to differentiate it by saying it rejects "focus[ing] single-mindedly on excelling at one virtue" but my impression was that virtue ethics was all about balance the golden median anyway. And then it seems pretty close to sincerit... (read more)

2
Owen Cotton-Barratt
1mo
I'm not sure how central this is to your point, but for what it's worth I think you may be overestimating the degree to which I'd disagree with normal judgements about what's wholesome. I would also basically never describe experimenting with drugs as wholesome. (Maybe I'd make an exception if someone was travelling to a country where they were legal in order to experiment with things that might relieve pain from a chronic condition or something; of course it would depend on the details of their attitude.) I think that it wouldn't be unusual, though, to describe it as more wholesome to have got drunk one or two times in college than to have been too straight laced ever to do that. (I say, as someone who has never got drunk.) Overall I feel like I agree with the normal senses of unwholesome and add some extra things which I regard as unwholesome, which normally might not register. Then in some circumstances the least-unwholesome action on my account will be one that involves some of the regular sense of unwholesomeness.
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Owen Cotton-Barratt
1mo
I think it's partially that (where the point of the vibes is often that they're helpful for tracking things which aren't directly good/bad, but have an increased chance of causing good/bad things down the line). It's also a bit like "consequentialism, but with some extra weight on avoiding negative consequences to things you're interacting with" (where the point of this is that it distributes responsibility in a sensible way across agents). I agree that my sense is somewhat revisionist, although I think it's more grounded in the usual usage than you're giving it credit for. I did consider choosing a different word, but after talking it through with some folks felt better about "wholesome" than the alternatives. The main way in which I care about the vibes of the existing word is for people putting it into practice. I think if people ask of an action they're considering "what are the ways in which this might not be wholesome?", it will be easy to feel answers to that question. If I try to define "holistically-good" and then people ask "what are the ways in which this might not be holistically-good?", I think they'll more get caught up in explicit verbal models and not notice things which they might have caught as answers to the first question.  Put another way: one of my guiding principles for this is to try to have an account of things such that I think it could lead to people doing the good ambitious versions of EA, but such that I find it hard to imagine SBF trying to follow it could have made the same mistakes, even if there was motivated cognition towards doing so. Stuff about side constraints doesn't really feel robust enough to me. If there's a new term it could be vulnerable to a lot of reinterpretation. Anchoring in the existing term serves to resist that. Maybe I'm supposed to more explicitly separate out the thing you do felt mental checks for from the thing that you overall choose to pursue? I'm worried that gets contrived. 

This seems like an isolated demand for rigour. When Hormel employees and other associated people gave $500k to an end-of-life care charity - a donation which is part of Lewis's data - I don't think this was a secret scheme to increase beef consumption. (I'm not really sure why it's captured in this data at all actually). People who work in agriculture aren't some sort of evil caricature who only donate money to oppose animal protection; a lot of their donations are probably motivated by the same concerns that motivate everyone else.

3
LewisBollard
1mo
Thanks for flagging that. I agree that most of the funds donated by animal ag employees were not to oppose animal protection, or likely any specific policies. I should have clarified that. I also generally don't think of people working in agriculture as evil. I think they're mostly just doing the rationale thing given the goal of profit maximization, and the lack of constraints we've imposed on how to pursue that.
2
MichaelStJules
1mo
Ya, I wouldn't want to count that. I didn't check what the data included. I agree. I think if the money is coming through an interest/industry group or company, not just from an employee or farmer, then it's probably usually lobbying for that interest/industry group or company or otherwise to promote the shared interests of that group. Contributions from individuals could be more motivated by political identity and other issues than just protecting or promoting whatever industry they work in.

Wait - did vegans and animal rights groups really donate approximately $0 to political donations (at least in 2020)? 

Surely SBF count[s/ed] as a vegan and an animal rights guy? He alone donated over $5m to Biden.

I doubt that was to support animal protection, though.

Thanks for writing this up and sharing it.

Do you have a good account for when counting arguments do and do not work? My impression is they often do work in everyday life, or at least can provide a good prior to be updated away from. Like if I'm wondering who I will meet first when I go into school, a counting argument correctly predicts that any single specific person is quite unlikely. Is the idea that humans are typically good at ontology dividing, such that each of the options are roughly equivalent, but this intuition doesn't work well for SGD?

Thanks for writing this. 

I was curious about this claim, because I was not sure what the intended causal mechanism would be:

Taking parental leave shorter than 1 month does not mitigate productivity losses, but parental leave longer than 1 month and less than 12 months correlated with an 11%–17% productivity[2] improvement

But when I look at the chart in the citation it makes it look like <1 month leave does typically have positive impacts?

2
Julia_Wise
1mo
I'd also guess it's confounded by more intense careers and people who are more dedicated to spending a lot of time at work. I doubt you change outcomes much by taking a shorter leave, once your personality and career are already a given.
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Nicholas Kruus
1mo
Good catch; thank you very much. I misinterpreted the findings—an embarrassing mistake on my part. I’ve updated the post to address this.
2
Jason
1mo
I see a small, non-statistically significant reduction for non-US women for <1 mo. But I'm not sure if any of the results for non-US women are statistically significant, and less than a month to six months all look fairly similar for the US sample.

I'm surprised you object so strenuously to taking the log of GNI/Capita or GDP/capita. This to me seems like a very natural thing to do, given the diminishing marginal utility of money, and the nature of the distribution of national incomes. If you don't take logs (or similar) your model will presumably be quite insensitive to the differences between really poor and really really poor. Indeed, I note you yourself use log GDP as the independent variable in a chart on the very next page (p17).

3
Alexander Loewi
1mo
The chart you're referring to, for those who aren't looking at the paper, is not a chart of life satisfaction -- it is a chart of carbon emissions. So pretty fundamentally, I don't think the comparison is relevant. But in addition, the outcome (emissions) is also log-transformed, which makes the relationship much more intuitive -- and since both axes are clearly labeled, and contain all relevant information, I don't see any possibility of confusion. By contrast, the use of log GDP in models of satisfaction appears to only have a potential for confusion, especially when the WHR only mentions this transformation in the technical tables, fails to mention it in their most prominent descriptions, and only transforms this single variable in that way. Furthermore, as I describe in quite substantial detail in the paper, the argument they give to justify this transformation (improved model fit) simply doesn't hold up to statistical scrutiny when you're using a properly specified model. This isn't just a marginal technical complaint either -- the transformation exaggerates the effect by 1100% I agree that there may be non-linearities in the effect, but this is equally possible with any of the other variables. This is worth exploring, but I think it is much more important to make sure the dramatic potential improvements from simple changes are recognized before getting into more subtle, and far more slippery, models, especially when the current model isn't showing serious issues. But most critically, the whole goal is to not just assume that we know how life satisfaction works, but rather to let the data tell us. And when the data simply doesn't support a log transform, I'm not going to include it.

Thanks for sharing. I didn't quite understand the methodology in the paper (e.g. why 4.1 degrees as baseline? and I saw 0.29 as the total lifetime impact, rather than 1.16) but either way it seems to agree that the post's implicit estimates were way too high.

In this case, the example is no longer hypothetical as an individual who changes his habits to reduce carbon emissions is literally saving not one but many children who are at risk of drowning from floods caused by rising global temperatures, among other disasters caused by global warming. Thus, there is strong support for the second premise. The actions an individual can take to reduce the carbon emissions of his consumption habits are simple and at little cost to the individual. These actions include switching off electrical appliances when not in use, u

... (read more)
5
tobytrem
1mo
This paper I read a few years ago gives an estimate for the mortality cost of carbon emissions. Obviously this is highly uncertain and would change based on projected policy changes/ new technology. The mainline estimate is that the average American's lifetime emissions lead to 1.16 excess deaths before 2100. 

Dumb suggestion: is there any way you could find someone in Germany who needed one and then make a directed donation? Maybe there is a Facebook group or Reddit for such people.

1
Scodischarge
1mo
That's not a bad idea. Though AFAIK clinics check your relationship with the recipient and aren't afraid to reject you if they don't deem you close enough. But I'll check the option out, thanks!

But I think there's a fundamental problem with that approach: in this scenario, the EVFs aren't employing anyone! They are deciding whether or not to make grants of EVF assets and IP to wholly independent, newly formed organizations. You'd need a legal authority that made it illegal for EVF to adopt a policy of generally not making these kinds of grants to organizations whose boards were wholly lacking in certain forms of diversity. 

This does not seem to be a stretch to me. Your proposed strategy would allow for widespread circumvention of anti-discri... (read more)

I think there are a number of presumptive criteria the EVF Boards could set for approval of a spin-off: ... not all men; not all White people; not all US or all UK people, etc.

This sounds like a bad idea to me. Board membership decisions should be made on the basis of merit, not discrimination. As EV/CEA previously said: "CEA is committed to building an EA community where racism is unacceptable".

In addition to being immoral, I also think this would probably be illegal. The use of racial and sex-based quotas in employment is prohibited under Title VII of th... (read more)

In addition to being immoral, I also think this would probably be illegal. 

I think this would likely be legal. Your analysis is US-focused; I'm not well-versed in other jurisdictions' laws either, so I'll leave that to the side. The California case (and the UNC portion of the Harvard case) involved state action, which is absent here. Students for Fair Admission involved the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d et seq., which "prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities rec... (read more)

I think this is sort of right - while climate change is often the main ideological reason people quote for not wanting to have children, typically personal reasons for the would-be parents come first (lifestyle, housing etc.). See for example:

Those who do not have children and do not want to have a child in the future more often express concern about their personal situation, compared to external factors, as influencing their decisions:

  • Personal independence: 54%
  • Personal financial situation: 46%
  • Work/life balance: 40%
  • Housing prices: 33%
  • Safety: 31%
  • US politics
... (read more)


As you probably are aware, there was recently a successful EA-adjacent campaign against the Bully XL dog in the UK.

These dogs were explicitly bred from pitbulls for fighting and aggression, and as a result are very dangerous - >70% of human deaths from dog attacks were from Bullies, and they are massively over-represented among dogs seized by the police. They are estimated at below 1% of the dog population - though the recent figures suggest they are far from 1% - meaning they are more than 300x more dangerous than the typical dog population.

Despite thi... (read more)

1
Emma_Slav
2mo
The XLB has been referred to recently as a 'fighting breed derived from the pit bull', however, other sources of information dispute the origins of this dog. Multiple sources refer to this breed of dog as one who was selected as a companion and family dog. For example, the United Kennel Club refers to this dog as ‘first and foremost, a companion, exhibiting confidence with a zest and exuberance for life. Although there are breeds and types of dogs originally bred and selected for fighting, this does not mean that individuals within a particular breed or type are inherently aggressive or pose any greater risk of aggressive behaviour towards people or other animals. The selection for specific physical and temperamental attributes can result in serious injuries. However, the extent to which these characteristics are expressed or displayed will vary within individuals and are influenced by the way in which the dogs are bred and their lifetime experiences therefore, not all individuals of the same type will behave in the same way.  There is a distinct lack of verifiable evidence of the types of dogs involved in bite incidents, with data not regularly and uniformly recorded by police. The XL Bully has largely come to attention by social and traditional media sources where the breed or type of dog involved in an incident often can not be substantiated. There is no conclusive evidence that shows any breed as being more aggressive than another or inherently aggressive, although we acknowledge that the larger the breed the greater the capacity for harm if they display aggressive behaviour. Focusing on specific breeds potentially provides a false assumption that all other dogs are safe, where in  reality any dog has the capacity to be dangerous if irresponsibly bred, reared and socialised. This is why our focus has always been on tackling the causal factors of aggressive behaviour which includes the way in which dogs are bred, reared and their lifetime experiences. Some of t

By now I think people are well aware of the basic arguments for and against grant application feedback. To move the conversation forward it might be helpful for people to try to quantify how valuable and/or costly it would be to them. For example, if you are a grant applicant, how much lower a probability of funding would you be willing to accept in return for brief or detailed feedback? If you are a grant evaluator, how much extra time would it take to provide feedback, and how often would the feedback be so critical the applicant would likely find it unpleasant to receive?

We can safely say that their low income significantly reduces their life expectancy:

Unless I've misread it I don't think the linked article shows this? It shows they are correlated, but not how the causation goes, and there are many clear candidates for common causes. For example, having a serious medical condition might make it harder for you to work, reducing your income, and cause you to die sooner, reducing your life expectancy.

I would expect lower income to reduce life expectancy somewhat but for things like health, pollution, IQ, drug addiction, cons... (read more)

5
Abbey Chaver
2mo
Very true, the study definitely does not provide a causal result, and the language I used about moving people out up an income tier definitely implied a causal attitude. I also agree that health and pollution are major factors, and would argue that people with more income have more ability to improve these factors or mitigate their impacts. Eg, more income allows better access to health care, nutrition, moving to less polluted areas or being able to pay for Asthma treatment. Thanks for calling this out!

Also talk to me if you recognize this cultural offputtingness I'm talking about: I'm preparing a series of posts on diversity and AI and need to back it up as much as I can, despite the youth of the field. 

The "please send me supporting anecdotes" method of evidence gathering.

0
Vaipan
2mo
Well that is a step among others, and asking is better than not asking and acting as if there was no issues at all. I didn't specify the epistemic value I would attribute to these testimonies, so this is a sneaky comment.  But I was expecting you--never fail to comment negatively on posts that dare bringing up these issues. For someone who clearly says in a comment under a post about political opinions on EA that we need more right-wingers in EA and who also says that EA shouldn't be carrying leftist discourses to avoid being discredited, you sure are consistent in your fights. Nothing much about the content of the post though so I guess you didn't have much to say aside from inferring the epistemic value I'd put on anecdotal data.  For those who would worry about the 'personal aspect' of this comment, understand that when you see a pattern of someone constantly advocating against a topic every time it's brought up on the topic, it sounds legitimate to me to understand why such a thing happen. There is motivated reasoning here--I don't expect objectivity on this topic from someone who so openly shows their political camp. Since Larks isn't attacking anything content-wise about the post other than some assumption on methodology, I do feel justified to note Lark's lack of objectivity.  That is all I needed to say, there is no need to comment further on my side to avoid escalation. I just want people to have a clear picture of who is commenting here and the motivation behind.

Well I agree this is a better idea than that one, but I suspect it is still a bad one. For most orgs internal feedback will probably be confidential (e.g. "your project is now behind schedule, but that was mainly due to legal" clearly has information that would be potentially valuable to competitors).

But again, my primary question is the same: how often have you actually asked a hiring manager to send you their feedback? How often did they share it? What did it contain?

3
yanni
3mo
Only done it once, didn't have it available. But believe you me, the day will come where I have an idea you like. You just wait.

Very intelligent people have been working very hard on finding way to improve economic development for many years. Unlikely that outsiders on an internet forum will see neglected solutions.

This post is a list of projects that very intelligent people have been working very hard on for years that you could fund.

0
Henry Howard
2mo
If any of these think tanks had good evidence that their strategy reliably affected economic development, the strategy would quickly be widely adopted and promoted by the thousands of economic development researchers and organisations striving to find such a strategy. Economic development is not a neglected or underfunded field.

Thanks. Do you have any concrete tips on how to avoid falling down stairs?

1
wes R
2mo
Another one is to lean forwards when going up the stairs. That way, if you fall, you fall forwards, not backwards; forwards = face first into stairs, backwards = roll down the stairs. when going diwn the stairs, lean BACKWARDS; simmilar reasoning applies.
3
Joseph Lemien
3mo
This may seem silly, but when I walk up or down stairs that have a handrail, I almost always hover my hand near/over the handrailing. This a just in case behavior of mine: if my feet slip/stumble my hand can quickly grab the railing. If it is in my own house I just allow my hand  to hold the railing, but if it is in a public place that I assume is filthy (such as a subway handrailing) I don't want to touch something that so many other people have touched, so my hand hovers. If you own a house with stairs that lack hand rail, I suggest getting one installed. That seems like a fairly easy preventative measure.
3
Jason
3mo
Build elevators everywhere? (To generalize, consider whether to use fancy technology like commercial airplanes rather than dangerous cheaper older technologies like personal automobiles.)
1
wes R
3mo
hold onto the handrails.

How many times have you requested a hiring manager do a work test for you? For what types of roles? Did you compensate them for their time?

The basic employment relationship is:

  • Firm pays wages.
  • Employee does work.

This is asymmetric because the firm's obligations are typically very fixed: they have to pay exactly $X every two weeks or they will get in a lot of trouble very quickly. In contrast, what is demanded from employees is typically a lot more nebulous. The firm can't easily know how talented the candidates are, or how hard they will work. If the perfor... (read more)

-3
yanni
3mo
I've not done it before, but if I was hiring and a strong candidate asked me to do it, I would!

Update: the Eight Circuit has just upheld a ban in Iowa on using deception to gain employment in order to cause economic harm to the employer. So my guess is these investigations are illegal now, at least in Iowa.

2
Jason
3mo
At least harder. One loophole for these kinds of laws is that the intent to deceive has to be there at the time the false employment statement was made. As a commenter on the linked post noted by analogy, loan fraud exists when you never intended to repay, not when you decided not to after getting the loan.

In places with high childhood mortality, for example, the expected number of life-years gained from saving a relatively young adult might be higher than a baby. This is because some proportion of babies will die from various diseases early in life, whereas young adults who have "made it through" are more likely to die in old age.

I'm skeptical this consideration actually applies in practice. This argument would have applied in the past but not any more; according to OWID, Somalia has the world's highest infant mortality at 14%. So even there a young adult (... (read more)

4
Stephen Clare
3mo
Hm, yeah, I think you're right. I remember seeing some curve where the value of saving a life initially rises as a person ages, then falls, but it must be determined by the other factors mentioned by others rather than the mortality thing.

According to the first result in Google, doctors' total pay, while significantly lower than the UK, is still significantly above the UK average, even for junior doctors. Their hourly rate is surprisingly low but that's mainly because they work very long hours.

As a result, consultants’ basic NHS pay will be between £93,666 and £126,281, with average full-time NHS earnings likely to be around £143,100 once additional earnings are included to cover things such as on-call responsibility, medical awards, geographical allowances and additional activity.

For junio

... (read more)
3
David T
3mo
"Healthcare workers" includes nurses, and can encompass care workers and semi-skilled hospital workers on not much more than minimum wage, and I guess the figure may have been chosen to take into account that many of them may consider the nature of the work they do to be pretty altruistic already... I do wonder whether a non-specific giving pledge is better than a low percentage though?

I assumed Nick was being sincere? 

Yes I was being sincere. I might have missed some meta thing here as obviously I'm not steeped in AI alignment. Perhaps Trevor intended to reply on another comment but mistakenly replied here?

It might help if you summarized the arguments made in the video or, ideally, shared a transcript.

1
Joseph Quevedo
3mo
I didn't know if it was okay for me to push the whole transcript onto here, is that usually done that way?

I think it's worth not entangling the word 'censorship' with whether it is justified. During the Second World War the UK engaged in a lot of censorship, to maintain domestic morale and to prevent the enemy from getting access to information, but this seems to me to have been quite justified, because the moral imperative for defeating Germany was so great.

Similarly, it seems quite possible to me that in the future CEA might be quite justified in instituting AI-related censorship, preventing people from publishing writing that disagrees with the house line. ... (read more)

It seems possible to me that the FTX and EV related censorship was justified, though it is hard to tell, given that EV have never really explained their reasons, and I think the policy certainly had very significant costs. 

I think it is highly likely that imposing a preclearance requirement on employees was justified. It would be extremely difficult for an attorney to envision everything that an employee might conceivably write and determine without even seeing it whether it would cause problem. Even if the attorney could, they would have to update th... (read more)

In the 20 years of the Soviet programme, with all the caveats that we don’t fully know what the programme was, but from the best reading of what we know from the civil side of that programme, they really didn’t get that far in creating agents that actually meet all of those criteria [necessary for usefulness in biological warfare]. They got somewhere, but they didn’t get to the stage where they had a weapon that changed their overall battlefield capabilities; that would change the outcome of a war, or even a battle, over the existing weapon systems availab

... (read more)

As an example, could you give X/10 ratings to the idea of relative and absolute ratings?

Great point about the counterfactual for the funding, I should have thought of it and included in the post in the first place. Thanks a lot for sharing this great comment!

Interesting argument about 'side effects' vs 'externalities'. I was assuming that organizations/individuals were being 'selfishly' rational, and assuming that a relatively small fraction of things like the field-building effects would benefit the specific organization doing the field-building. But 'side effects' does seem like it might be more accurate, so possibly I should adjust the title.

1
Oliver Sourbut
3mo
Sure, take it or leave it! I think for the field-building benefits it can look more obviously like an externality (though I-the-fundraiser would in fact be pleased and not indifferent, presumably!), but the epistemic benefits could easily accrue mainly to me-the-fundraiser (of course they could also benefit other parties).

Thanks! I guess I was just bad at navigating the website.

1
Howie_Lempel
3mo
No worries! It takes a couple clicks to get there.

Hey Howie, over ten months later I still don't see anything on the website. (Unless I am just unusually bad at reading websites). Was this followed up on?

Hey Larks,

[For transparency - I no longer work at EV.]

Yep - this was followed up on. Here are links to the pages for EV UK and EV US.

Good question! That was my interpretation of this, since if all the projects are offboarded I do not see what is left:

... we are planning to take significant steps to decentralize the effective altruism ecosystem by offboarding the projects which currently sit under the Effective Ventures umbrella. This means CEA, 80,000 Hours, Giving What We Can and other EV-sponsored projects will transition to being independent legal entities, with their own leadership, operational staff, and governance structures. We anticipate the details of the offboarding proce

... (read more)

As a follow-up, this recent NBER paper on people who receive unexpected cash windfalls in Sweden rejected the idea that poverty was the main causal factor behind poor people committing crimes at a higher rate; their non-significant point estimate was in fact that wealth transfers increased crime (though this could easily be noise). It would be good if we could contrast it with the GiveDirectly result, to see if the different environment (random vs predictable, Sweden vs Kenya) made a significant difference. 

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