All of MathiasKB's Comments + Replies

But why exactly should I help those in the community who believe that the moral thing to do when someone is on their knees is to curb stomp them while yelling “I should have been admitted to EAG 2016!”? Why should I expose myself further by doing ambitious things (No I don’t mean fraud- that’s not an ambitious thing that’s a --- criminal--- thing) when if I fail people are going to make everything worse by screaming “I told you so” to signal that they never would have been such a newb? Yeah. No. The circle I’m drawing around who is and is not in my communi

Thank you for writing this. It's barely been a week, take your time.

There's been a ton of posts on the forum about various failures, preventative measures, and more. As much as we all want to get to the bottom of this and ensure nothing like this ever happens again, I don't think our community benefits from hasty overcorrections. While many of the points made are undoubtedly good, I don't think it will hurt the EA community much to wait a month or two before demanding any drastic measures.

EA's should probably still be ambitious. Adopting rigorous governanc... (read more)

I wouldn't conclude much from the future fund withholding funds for now. Even if they are likely in the clear, freezing payments until they have made absolutely sure strikes me as a very reasonable thing to do.

My only worry will be that there will be more things posted in a short time than anyone will have time to read. I'm still working my way through all the cause area reports. Some system to distribute the posts out to prevent fatigue might be warranted for events like these and future writing contests.

You can only spend your resources once. Unless you argue that there is a free lunch somewhere, any money and time spent by UN inevitably has to come from somewhere else. Arguing that longtermist concerns should be prioritized necessarily requires arguing that other concerns should be de-prioritized.

If EA's or the UN argue that longtermism should be a priority, it's reasonable for the authors to question from where those resources are going to come.

For what it's worth I think it's a no-brainer that the UN should spend more energy on ensuring the future goes... (read more)

To me it seems they understood longtermism just fine and just so happen to disagree with strong longtermism's conclusions. We have limited resources and if you are a longtermist you think some to all of those resources should be spent ensuring the far future goes well. That means not spending those resources on pressing neartermist issues.

If EAs, or in this case the UN, push for more government spending on the future the question everyone should ask is where that spending should come from. If it's from our development aid budgets, that potentially means removing funding for humanitarian projects that benefit the worlds poorest.

This might be the correct call, but I think it's a reasonable thing to disagree with.

Thank you, this is an excellent post. This style of transparent writing can often come across as very 'ea' and gets made fun of for its idiosyncrasies, but I think it's a tremendous strength of our community.
 

I would advise you to shorten the length of the total application to around one fourth of what it is currently. Focus on your strong points (running a growing business, strong animal welfare profile) and leave out the rest. The weaker parts of your application water down the parts which are the strongest.

Admissions are always a messy process and good people get rejected often. A friend of mine who I'm sure will go on to become a top-tier ai safety engineer, got rejected from eag, because there isn't a great way to convey this information through an application form. Vetting people at scale is just really difficult.

Thanks for writing this Jonas. As someone much below the lesswrong average at math, I would be grateful for a clarification of this sentence:

Provided $p_j,d_k$, $p_j,p_k$ and $d_j,d_k$ are independent when $j\ne k$

What does $j$ and $k$ refer to here? Moreover is it a reasonable assumption, that the uncertainties of existential risks are independent? It seems to me that many uncertainties run across risk types, such as chance of recovery after civilisations collapse.

For anyone interested in pursuing this further Charity Entrepreneurship is looking to incubate a charity working on road traffic safety.

Their report on the topic can be found here: https://www.charityentrepreneurship.com/research

Thanks for giving everyone the opportunity to provide feedback!

I'm unsure how I feel about the section on global poverty and wellbeing. As of now, the section mostly just makes the same claim over and over that some charities are more effective than others, without much rigorous discussion around why that might be.

There's a ton of great material under the final 'differences in impact' post that I would love to see as part of the main sequence. Right now, I'm worried that people new to global health and development will leave this section feeling waay overc... (read more)

Words cannot express how much I appreciate your presence Nuno.

Sorry for being off-topic but I just can't help myself. This is comment is such a perfect example of the attitude that made me fall in with this community.

Yeah, you're right.

I think the meta-point might be the crux of our disagreement.

I mostly agree with your inside view that other catastrophic risks struggle to be existential the way AI would, and I'm often a bit perplexed as to how quick people are to jump from 'nearly everyone dies' to 'literally everyone dies'. Similarly I'm sympathetic to the point that it's difficult to imagine particularly compelling scenarios where AI doesn't radically alter the world in some way.

But we should be immensely uncertain about the assumptions we make and I would argue the far most likely fi... (read more)

for example:

• intelligence peaks more closely to humans, and super intelligence doesn't yield significant increases to growth.
• superintelligence in one domain doesn't yield superintelligence in others, leading to some, but limited growth, like most other technologies.
• we develop EMs which radically changes the world, including growth trajectories, before we develop superintelligence.

AI is directly relevant to both longterm survival and longterm growth. When we create a superintelligence, there are three possibilities. Either:

1. The superintelligence is misaligned and it kills us all
2. The superintelligence is misaligned with our own objectives but is benign
3. The superintelligence is aligned, and therefore can help us increase the growth rate of whatever we care about.

I think there are many more options than this, and every argument that follows banks entirely your logical models being correct. Engineers can barely design a bike that wil... (read more)

Similarly, once you introduce a “reliable predictor”, everything goes out the window and the money is the least of your concern. But granting the premise, fine, I One Box

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the experiment just need a predictor who does better than random? The oracle could just just your good friend who knows your tendencies better than random,  as long as box b's payout is high enough.

Many of the comments in this video were incredibly inspiring for me to read.

Most outside engagement with EA I see tends to scew heavily negative. I tend to disprortionally focus on the negative as those impressions are especially important for me to understand, so reading comments claiming how inspired they felt by the prospects of humanity, was so refreshing! Where was the all the sneering I'm so used to!?

Thanks for the comment, I'd like to know that as well!

Since writing the article and diving further into the antivenom crisis, I think I've actually doubled down on cost of treatment being the primary issue.

When faced with the following options:

1. long trip to clinic, expensive treatment that may not work.
2. short trip to local healer, inexpensive treatment that may not work

I can understand why someone would opt for the latter.

My model would be that people would become much more willing to go to the hospital for , when they see acqaintance after acqaintance... (read more)

it's not obvious that undifferentiated scientific progress is net bad either. Scientific progress increases our wealth and allows for us to spend a larger fraction on safety than we otherwise would. I'd much prefer to live in a world where we can afford both nukes and safety measures, than the world in which we only could afford the nukes.

Scientific progress  has been the root of so much progress, I think we should have a strong prior that more of it is good!

I absolutely think we should stick to that messaging. Trying to do the the most good, rather than some good is the core of our movement. I would point out that there are also many doctors who were not discouraged and chose to change their career entirely as a result of EA. I personally know a few who ended up working on the very things you encourage!

That said we should of course be careful when discouraging interventions if we haven't looked into the details of each cost-effectiveness analysis, as it's easy to arrive at a lower looking impact simply due to methodological differences between Givewell's cost-effectiveness analysis and yours.

It was nice to read something that was both well-written and well-intentioned!

I don't agree with the proposed alternative to longtermism of 'ineffective altruism' eschewing metrics in favour of doing things what intuitively feels right.  If you disagree with longtermism the natural conclusion to me intuitively seems to be doubling down on high empirical standards and measurability.

On a slightly uncharitable side note, something I find amusing is that it's not long ago we were getting criticised for being overly obsessed with only what could be measure... (read more)

Since writing this article, this is actually one of the things I've been looking into! I think it looks very promising, as many of the issues outlined by WHO seem downstream from people simply being unable to afford high quality antivenom. (ie. why do people choose local healers? Because hospitals cost more and don't help either!)

It also looks like the marginal cost of high quality antivenom would decrease up to an order of magnitude if you scale up production. I have yet to take an in depth look at synthetic antivenom production, but after briefly looking into it, it seems that we are not going to get synthetic antivenom just yet.

Either they start as grifters but actually get good results and then rise to power (at that point they might not be grifters anymore) or they don't get any results and don't rise to power.

I largely agree with this, but I think it's important to keep in mind that "grifter" is not a binary trait. My biggest worry is not that people who are completely unaligned with EA would capture wealth and steer it into the void, but rather that of 10 EA's the one most prone to "grifting" would end up with more influence than the rest.

What makes this so difficult is that ... (read more)

man you just blew my mind, will give it a try next time I feel an urge to play around with GPT!

If the comments include a prediction my guess is that GPT would often make the same prediction and thus become much more accurate. Not because it learned to predict things but because there's probably a strong correlation between the community prediction and the most upvoted comments prediction.

If the goal is to give GPT more context than just the title of the question, then you could include the descriptions for each question as well, but when I tried this I got worse results (fewer legible predictions).

Open philanthropy is not the only grantmaker in the EA Space! If you add the FTX Community, FTX Future Fund, EA Funds etc. my guess would be that it recently made  a large shift towards longtermism, primarily due to the Future fund being so massive.

I also want to emphasize that many central EA Organisations are increasingly focused on longtermist concerns, and not as transparent about it as I would like for them to be. People and organisations should not pretend to care about things they do not for the sake of optics. One of EA's most central tenets i... (read more)

The page linked in my comment states that they are not currently accepting unsolicited proposals, but I agree the FAQ makes it sound like they are open to being contacted. My guess is there probably isn't a clear cut policy and that they just want to avoid setting an expectation that they will evaluate everything sent their way.

Will send them a message, thank you  :)

When I first learned about the diagnostics startup, my immediate thought was that some EA Fund would be interested in further evaluating it.  Unfortunately neither Open Philanthropy, EA Funds, or FTX Community are currently accepting unsolicited proposals.

The primary reason I wrote this post was to get the attention of fund-managers, and hopefully get someone to figure out if this is impactful and fund it if it is.

I wondered about this as well. There's no doubt that it would reduce snakebites, but whether it's cost-effective is more difficult to tell.

An analyst I spoke to pointed out to me that after all it's still pretty rare to be bitten by a snake. The amount of footwear you'd need to distribute per snakebite prevented is pretty high, and likely pretty expensive.

Most purchases I on reflection would prefer not to make are purchases where what I would receive would be worth much more than nothing but still less than the asking price, so I would never actually be compelled to throw out the superfluous stuff I buy.

Many times the purchase would even be worth more than the asking price, but I would like for my preferences to change such that it no longer would be the case.

If a bhikkhu monk can be content owning next to nothing, surely I can be happy owning less than I currently do. The question is how I change my preferences to become more like that of the monk.

Does anyone have advice on getting rid of material desire?

Unlike many I admire I seem to have a much larger desire to buy stuff I don't need. For example I currently feel an overpowering urge to spend $100 on a go board, despite the fact that I little need for one.

I'm not arguing that I have some duty to live frugally due to EA, I just would prefer to be a version of myself that doesn't feel the need to spend money on as much stupid stuff.

good point!

Thanks for this, especially for your point on hedging! If you want to convey your uncertainty, there is no shame in saying "I am not sure about this" before making your claim. 

On the topic of good forum writing, a few additional things I try to keep in mind when I write:

• Most readers will only skim-read your post. Make sure to use descriptive headlines that make it easy for the reader to jump in and out and read only the parts that interest them.
• Logically structure your writing as a pyramid. Present information as it is needed. Your reader shouldn't ha

tags.tag_types causing you trouble is likely the python namespace giving you issues.

Anyways, I put all of the code into a notebook to make it easier to reproduce. I hope this is close to what you had in mind. Haven't used these things much myself.

https://github.com/MperorM/ea-forum-analysis/blob/main/plots-notebook.ipynb

My guess was that an external document would reduce readership too much to justify. Nevertheless here is a notebook with this post's content and the code:
https://github.com/MperorM/ea-forum-analysis/blob/main/plots-notebook.ipynb

Great question, I took the categories from here:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tags/all

I have just gone off the assumption that whoever categorised the tags on this page, made a good judgement call. I agree completely that particularly longtermist stuff might look like a smaller fraction than it actually is, due to it being split across multiple categories. That said there are posts which fit under multiple longtermist categories which you'd have to ensure is not double-counted.

Thanks for the feedback, will put the code into a notebook when I have time tomorrow, should not take many minutes.

Thanks for the positive feedback! As far as I know there isn't a way to embed plots in the EA Forum, is there something I missed?

I think that is more or less what I'm trying to say!

Think of security at a company. Asking a colleague to show their badge before you let them into the building can be seen as rude. But enforcing this principle is also incredibly important for keeping your premises secure. So many companies have attempted to develop a culture where this is not seen as a rude thing to do, but rather a collective effort to keep the company secure.

Similarly I would think it's positive if we develop some sort of way to say "hey this smells fishy" without it being viewed as a direct attack, but rather someone participating in the collective effort to catch fraud.

I wouldn't worry about it, nothing about your writing in particular. It's not something that caused me any real distress! I think the topic of catching fraud is inherently prone to causing imposter-syndrome, if you often go around feeling like a fraud. You get that vague sense of 'oh no they finally caught me' when you see a post on the topic specifically on the EA Forum.

A central problem is that accusing something of being fraudulant carries an immense cost as its hard to percieve as anything but a direct attack. Whoever did the fraud has every incentive to shut you down and very little to lose which gets very nasty very quickly.

Ideally there would be a low commitment way to accuse someone of fraud that avoids this. Normalising something akin to "This smells fishy to me" and encouraging a culture of not taking it too personally, whenever the hunch turns out wrong might be a first step towards a culture where fraud is caught more quickly.

as a side note, maaaan did this post trigger a strong feeling of imposter syndrome in me!

Great post! I don't have fully formed view of the consequences of EA's increasing focus on longtermism, but I do think it was important that we notice and discuss these trends.

I actually spent some of my last saturday categorising all EA-forum posts by their cause-area^[1], and am planning on spending my next saturday making a few graphs over any trends I can spot on the forum.

The reason I wanted to do this is exactly because I had an inclination that global poverty posts were getting comparatively less engagement than it used to, and was wondering whether ... (read more)

I completely agree with this actually. I think concerns over unilaterialist's curse is a great argument in favour of keeping funding central, at least for many areas. I also don't feel particularly confident that attempts to spread out or democratize funding would actually lead to net-better projects.

But I do think there is a strong argument in favour of experimenting with other types of grantmaking, seeing as we have identified weaknesses in the current form which could potentially be alleviated.

I think the unilateralist's curse can be avoided if we make sure to avoid hazardous domains of funding  for our experiements to evaluate other types of grantmaking.

This is the high-impact opportunity I've been looking for my entire life! I've sold off all my stocks, my house and everything else I own, to maximize my donations to this project.