All of Nathan Young's Comments + Replies

It resolved to my personal credence so you shouldn’t take that more seriously than “nathan thinks it unlikely that”

This doesn't feel like a great response to me.

What's your response to this accusation, in Time? This behaviour doesn't sound like you but Naia outright lying would surprise me from my interactions with her. 

Bouscal recalled speaking to Mac Aulay immediately after one of Mac Aulay’s conversations with MacAskill in late 2018. “Will basically took Sam’s side,” said Bouscal, who recalls waiting with Mac Aulay in the Stockholm airport while she was on the phone. (Bouscal and Mac Aulay had once dated; though no longer romantically involved, they remain close friends.) “Will basically threatened Tara,”

Where does it talk about non-immigrants or non-voluntary in this quote?

1 person has received jail time. FTXFF had business practices that led to far more harm than Nonlinear's. 

An alternate stance on moderation (from @Habryka.)

This is from this comment responding to this post about there being too many bans on LessWrong. Note how the LessWrong is less moderated than here in that it (I guess) responds to individual posts less often, but more moderated in that I guess it rate limits people more without reason. 

I found it thought provoking. I'd recommend reading it.

Thanks for making this post! 

One of the reasons why I like rate-limits instead of bans is that it allows people to complain about the rate-limiting and to parti

Seems like that solution has worked well for years. Why is it not scaling now? It’s not like the forum is loads bigger than a year ago.

Sorry are you claiming that there is no value to extra lives but extra deaths are still bad so the virus that keeps killing living people is worse?
 

If so it seems the issue is that if extra lives are valueless, so are extra deaths.

Yeah maybe? 

Do you want to discuss it? I can understand value people would have taken from the post even while disagreeing with its general thrust. Also it's pretty hard for those people to suggest why they supported it if that's gonna tar them with being a racist, so it's possible they have reasons I can't guess. 

I guess there is the possibility of brigading though that always seems less likely to me than people seem to think it is. 

It also seems plausible that people saw it as some kind of free speech bellwether, though that seems mistaken to me (you can just downvote the bad stuff and upvote the good).

Seems a shame. My understanding was they did good work.

Some interesting stuff to read on the topic of when helpful things probably hurt people:

Helping is helpful

• My understanding is that minimum wage literature generally finds the minimum wage is good on net

Helping is hurtful

• Banning background checks increases racial discrimination by Matt Yglesias
• I sense that making no-fault firing more difficult is similarly damaging because orgs are scared to hire

seems like this is a pretty damning conclusion that we haven't actually come to terms with if it is the actual answer

I think it's kind of weird that the bar is no longer "<0 karma" but "quick and thorough rejection". I didn't even see the article until this whole thing came up. People are allowed to think articles you don't like have merit, it's one of the benefits of hidden voting. 

I can imagine why someone would upvote that. But overall I think it was an article I wouldn't recommend most people spend time on. 

It feels like you want there to be some harsher punishment/censorship/broader discussion here. Is that the case?

I found the original quote and pointed out you were being misquoted. That seems the relevant update here, over the specific words I used to describe that. 

I wrote about why I think the original post was bad on the post, but in short, it is long and seems to imply doing genetics work that is banned/disapproved of in the West in poor countries. You seem to say that's an error on my part, in which case, please title it differently and make clearer what you are suggesting. 

My sense is they weren't able to track their finances. Would you agree with that? Is there evidence I can look at for that?

I find a good heuristic is not to push huge changes on other (especially less powerful) people. I would be more sympathetic to pieces arguing that people in the West should be able to test their children for intelligence or just a piece trying to educate people about IQ. 

I wrote some more here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gaSHkEf3SnKhcSPt2/the-effective-altruist-case-for-using-genetic-enhancement-to?commentId=CDZrkj23QjGr8u97P 

I edited this post several times because I kept finding new things. About +6 karma was from an earlier edit. 

The post is at -22 karma. I don't think this is "An instance of white supremacist and Nazi ideology creeping onto the EA Forum".

I was going to say I found this quote very compelling, but the full quote is quite different to what you've quoted in this piece.

Quote in this artice:

If you are worried that an immigrant may be more likely to vote Democrat/Left, commit a crime, retain their non-Western culture or be on welfare and believe that it is et

I agree in terms of random discussions of race, but this one was related to a theory of impact, so it does seem relevant for this forum.

I don't think we need to fear this discussion, the arguments can be judged on their own merit. If they are wrong, we will find them to be wrong.

If anything, I think on difficult topics those of us with the energy should take time to argue carefully so that those who find the topic more difficult don't have to. 

But I'm not in favour of banning discussion of theories of impact, however we look upon them.

In general I think large changes shouldn't happen without consent. Seems a pretty bad idea to push onto poor nations when rich nations don't allow this. Note how this is different from vaccinations and cash transfers which are both legal and desired by those receiving them.

If westerners want to genetically enhance their kids they can, and if we give money to those in poverty and they decide to use it for genetic enhancement (unlikely), fair enough. But trialling things that we in the west find deeply controversial in poorer nations seems probably awful, wh... (read more)

Seems like the externalities of that action are either covered by the electricity cost or should be offset as a bundle. 

In either case it doesn't seem worth removing the functionality. 

I am not confident that another FTX level crisis is less likely to happen, other than that we might all say "oh this feels a bit like FTX".

Changes:

• Board swaps. Yeah maybe good, though many of the people who left were very experienced. And it's not clear whether there are due diligence people (which seems to be what was missing).
• Orgs being spun out of EV and EV being shuttered. I mean, maybe good though feels like it's swung too far. Many mature orgs should run on their own, but small orgs do have many replicable features.
• More talking about honesty. Not rea

I believe the theory is that Alamada had accepted money on behalf of FTX and FTX thought that they'd transferred it but they hadn't. And in the summer Alameda lost it. Honestly even writing that it looks like fraud, since they should have transferred it immediately.

On the Sam Harris podcast MacAskill and Harris seem to think it plausible that most of the 8bn$ of losses came in Summer 2022 - that Alameda was accepting funding on behalf of FTX, was meant to transfer it but didn't. To me this seems too generous to FTX. Does anyone know?

What do you mean by "(Author of the post)" 

How is this as a snapshot of the discussion so far?

You can edit the image here and post as a comment: https://link.excalidraw.com/l/82wslD39E6w/5wUzJOIPnRl 

Kind of frustrating that there isn't a single place for it to be discussed. 

There seems some pretty large things I disagree with in each of your arguments:

The second is a situation in which some highly capable AI that developers and users honestly think is safe or fine turns out not to be as safe as they imagined.

This seems exactly the sort of situation I want AI developers to think long and hard about. Frankly your counterexample looks like an example to me.

Autonomy seems like a primary feature of the highly capable advanced AI currently being built. None of the comparators typically used shares this feature. Surely, that should

I sense this post shouldn't be a community post. I know it's written to the EA community, but it's discussing a specific project. Feels like it shouldn't be relegated to the community section because of style.

I think that kind of thinking is appropriate in all these cases. The Whytham abbey purchase was an investment, but it is reasonable to compare the cost compared to other investments in these terms.

Thanks for writing this.

I am confused why people are defensive of @Sam Bankman-Fried. I am fond of him as person and he was gracious to me personally. I even checked up on him after the crash. But that doesn't change the fact he did a massive crime. 

It doesn't seem hard to say that I want Sam to be well as a person (and Caroline, Nishad, Gary and anyone else close to them) whilst also saying this was a huge and deliberate fraud. And I don't even think we need to have discussions about utilitarianism. Why trade so sloppily? Why hide it for such a long ... (read more)

I don't love this article but it's fine. In general many other articles about EA are too negative so it doesn't really seem worth writing a big correction when the median person who hears about EA probably hears about the right thing.

Specifically, are new readers gonna believe that EA has done a load of useful soul-searching because this articles says it? I doubt it. There are enough articles saying that EAs are a bunch of cynical psychopaths that many will probably assume this is the fluff piece (that it is). 

I don't really think this meta discussion... (read more)

Maybe, but nonetheless it is true. I don't read 'em. Do you?

I guess I feel a lot of things:

• Empathy - I try to save slugs and snails etc, so I get this feeling that we should take all lives mattering seriously. There is something caring and beautiful in this and I like this intuition
• Confusion - I have felt this about veganism a bit recently. I don't really think it's worth the amount of stress it caused me to be vegan in terms of animal lives saved. Perhaps I should do it for a month a year to remind me of the cost, but I until I hit diminishing returns on my work I should probably do that. I used to think "if I wer

This case is harder, but I'll note that in general I don't read EV explanations of spending less than $100mn. If there wasn't all the controversy, I doubt I'd care and probably I don't want EV feeling the need to explain every $20mn expenditure. Though this case may be different, hard to think about.

Yeah more broadly I try to only share criticism if it has points that someone thinks are valuable. I don't think it's defensible to say "oh I thought people might want to read it". I should take responsibility - "why am I putting it in front of people".

I have a piece I'm writing with some similar notes to this, may I send it to you when I'm done?

Okay, this should be a personal blog then I think

Yeah that seems right. Not sure what options one can click on crossposting to point that out. (I think the forum has a personal blog option, but I'm not sure that's so appropriate on LessWrong)

• How could it have better signalled it wasn't a puff piece?
• It sort of is a bit of a puff piece. I tried to talk about some negatives but I don't know that it's particularly even handed.
• I tend to get quite a lot of downvotes in general, so some is probably that.
• Beyond that, the title is quite provocative - I just used the title on my blog, but I guess I could have chosen something more neutral 

Though sometimes denouncement posts are net positive right? Like probably not the nonlinear one, but I guess more denouncement of SBF prior would have been good. 

I agree it's sort of a red flag, but it seems relevant whether this is a puff piece, right? 

If I were to do another, what should it be about?

It's very easy to use for personal forecasts.

I think also the quality of the comments has gone down. I have less expectation that I am gonna read interesting things.

A way your decisions are underrated is that this charity, if it existed, would possibly be much easier to fundraise for than GiveWell. Like rather than talking about bednets you'd have pictures of actual children. Perhaps typical donors would give to that competitively.

Have you considered writing up these as manifund impact grants. I can imagine some people might buy having saved some fraction of a child and then you'd have more money to spend. Likewise if you saw promising opportunities you could put them on there. 

Finally I find it pretty tragic tha... (read more)

Yeah I initially wrote that late at night in a mood. Ooops.

I think it might be worth testing what has happened to comments from high karma users/old accounts in the last year compared to previous years. I would predict a significantly higher drop off. 

Why? I guess I think there is inter-party conflict in EA between those who wish for it to be a charming well behaved space and those who wish anything to be able to be discussed. And each group taxes the other a bit and finds friction. This is expensive to all parties so demand shifts down. I am a bit di... (read more)