All of nathan98000's Comments + Replies

Any links to where Scott Alexander deliberately argues that black people have lower IQs for genetic reasons? I've been reading his blog for a decade and I don't recall any posts on this.

I think any discussion of race that doesn't take the equality of races as a given will be considered inflammatory. And regardless of the merits of the arguments, they can make people uncomfortable and choose not to associate with EA.

I think collections like this are helpful, but it's a misleading to say it presents the "frontier of publicly available knowledge."

Taking just the first section on moral truth as an example, it seems like a huge overstatement to say this collection of podcasts and forum posts gets people to the frontier of this subject. Philosophers have spent a long time on this, writing thousands of papers. And at a glance, it seems like all of OPs linked resources don't even intend to give an overview of the literature on meta-ethics. They instead present their own pers... (read more)

The concept of self-esteem has a somewhat checkered history in psychology. Here, an influential review paper finds that self-esteem leads people to speak up more in groups and to feel happier. But it fails to have consistent benefits in other areas of life such as educational/occupational performance or violence. And it may have detrimental effects, such as risky behavior in teens.

Overall, the benefits of high self-esteem fall into two categories: enhanced initiative and pleasant feelings. We have not found evidence that boosting self-esteem (by therapeuti

FWIW standard conceptions of existential risk would categorize suffering risks as a type of existential risk. For example, Nick Bostrom has defined it as "threats that could cause our extinction or destroy the potential of Earth-originating intelligent life." (emphasis mine)

I think indoctrination (at least among adults) is actually surprisingly difficult. The psychologist Hugo Mercier was recently on the 80,000 Hours podcast to discuss why.

And the other thing which has had much more dramatic consequences is the idea of brainwashing: the idea that if you take prisoners of war and you submit them to really harsh treatment — you give them no food, you stop them from sleeping, you’re beating them up — so you make them, as you are describing, extremely tired and very foggy, and then you get them to read Mao for hours and hours on

Fwiw this review discusses why Rutger Bregman's book is deeply flawed.

"That he felt the need to misrepresent the past and other cultures in order to provide a ‘hopeful’ history is rather a message of despair. Bregman presents hunter-gatherer societies as being inherently peaceful, antiwar, equal, and feminist likely because these are commonly expressed social values among educated people in his own society today. This is not history but mythology."

Interesting post! I think what would have made this more helpful would be a discussion of the kinds of arguments that led you to change your mind in each case. For example, you note that you were convinced of universal prescriptivism but then later came to reject it. A brief discussion of the relevant arguments for/against would be interesting!

[What] is required of the philosopher is also to provide grounding or to think about grounding upon which the intuitions pointed to by a thought experiment are consistent.

Why can't a philosopher just present a counterexample? In fact, it seems arguing from a specific alternative grounding would make Timmerman's argument weaker. As he notes (emphasis mine):

I have purposefully not made a suggestion as to how many (if any) children Lisa is obligated to rescue. I did so to make my argument as neutral as possible, as I want it to be consistent with any normativ

I don't quite understand your objection to Timmerman's thought experiment. You say it's "ad hoc" and "justifies our complacency arbitrarily", but it's unclear what you mean by these terms. And it's unclear why someone should agree that it's ad hoc and arbitrary.

This seems like a good summary! Was this downvoted merely because of a wrong pronoun?

I don't think advocating for libertarian socialism or anarcho-communism is a tractable way to improve the world. I also think it's not at all obvious that it would even be desirable.

And in the US at least, the term "social justice" has become extremely politically loaded, and I think it would be unwise for EAs to explicitly associate themselves with the term.

For someone not familiar with Farrell's work, what's the main problem with it?

I appreciate the post, though I think "The universe is meaningless" section wasn't so convincing. The universe is meaningless because we're the product of natural selection? I would want a better argument than that.

FWIW I think it's still the case that psychologists/neuroscientists are nowhere near developing an accurate lie detector. And the paper you cite doesn't seem to support the claim that lie detection technology is accurate. From the abstract (emphasis mine):

Analyzing the myriad issues related to fMRI lie detection, the article identifies the key limitations of the current neuroimaging of deception science as expert evidence and explores the problems that arise from using scientific evidence before it is proven scientifically valid and reliable. We suggest th

I'm personally skeptical that we'll ever "solve" what the neural basis of sentience is. That said, I think there are still some promising ways a better understanding of psychology can advance standard EA causes. Here's a paper that goes into more depth on this issue:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35981321/

But for the paradox's setup to make sense, the player must have, in some sense, made his decision before the prediction is made: he is either someone who is going to take both boxes or someone who is just going to take the opaque box.

This doesn't seem correct. It's possible to make a better than random guess about what a person will decide in the future, even if the person has not yet made their decision.

This is not mysterious in ordinary contexts. I can make a plan to meet with a friend and justifiably have very high confidence that they'll show up at the agreed time. But that doesn't preclude that they might in fact choose to cancel at the last minute.

I suppose I agree that humanity should generally focus more on catastrophic (non-existential) risks.

That said, I think this is often stated explicitly. For example, MacAskill in his recently book explicitly says that many of the actions we take to reduce x-risks will also look good even for people with shorter-term priorities.

Do you have any quote from someone who says we shouldn't care about catastrophic risks at all?

Maybe a more realistic example would be helpful here. There have been recent reports claiming that, although it will negatively affect millions of people, climate change is unlikely to be an existential risk. Suppose that's true. Do you think EAs should devote as much time and effort preventing climate change-level risks as they do preventing existential risks?

I found this post insightful! Although it's a brief post, I'd recommend providing a brief heading for each section for people who are heavy skimmers.

I'm not sure I understand your point then...

Surely a future in which humanity flourishes into the longterm future is a better one than a future where people are living as "ants." And if we have uncertainty about which path we're on and there are plausible reasons to think we're on the ant path, it can be worthwhile to figure that out so we can shift in a better direction.

For example: Does it make any difference whether a non-alligned superintelligent AGI will actively try to kill all humanity or not? If we are certain that it won't, we would still live in a world where we are the ants and it is humanity.

This misunderstands what an existential risk is, at least as used by the philosophers who've written about this. Nick Bostrom, for example, notes that the extinction of humanity is not the only thing that counts as an extinction risk.  (The term "existential risk" is unfortunately a misnomer in this regard.) Something that drastically curtails the future potential of humanity would also count.

I have no idea, I've spent less than a half hour looking into this. The Cochrane Review shows that there's maaaybe an advantage to water flossing, but there just haven't been that many studies on it. And the studies do assume that participants are  flossing/water flossing at the same frequency. If the pleasant sensation you get from water flossing motivates you to keep doing it, I think that's great!

I like this list!

Just a heads up for the studies about water flossing:

Two of them were  funded by WaterPik and another is published in the "Journal of Baghdad College of Dentistry," which looks... suspicious from my naive perspective.

A recent Cochrane Review compares toothbrushing against tooth brushing + water flossing (aka "oral irrigating"):

Very-low certainty evidence suggested oral irrigators may reduce gingivitis measured by GI at one month (SMD -0.48, 95% CI -0.89 to -0.06; 4 trials, 380 participants), but not at three or six months. Low-certain

Upvoted for curating a list of other product recommendations. Very helpful!

Just to explain why I downvoted this:

I thought that the post could be summarized as: Sometimes it's rational to change one's mind quickly.

I agree that's true, but I don't see it as especially insightful. And the idea of listing out more ways in which people might be irrational isn't all that neglected. See, for example, the Wikipedia page on biases, which lists hundreds(?) of biases.

I'd prefer to see more substantive posts on this forum.

I'm sorry to hear that you've experienced sexism both within and outside EA.

Just to clarify your view, you said that:

there is data to suggest the variability hypothesis may be true in some places and for certain kinds of intelligence.

But an implication of the hypothesis is that men will make up a greater proportion of the "intelligent" people in those places for those kinds of intelligence.

Do you think it would be fine to use this information as a prior in those contexts?

One trouble I've always had with the capabilities approach is with how one figures out what counts as a capability worth having. For example, I agree it's good for people to be able to choose their career and to walk outside safely at night. But it seems to me like this is precisely because people generally have strong preferences about what career to have and about their safety. If there was a law restricting people from spinning in a circle and clapping one's hands exactly 756 times, this would be less bad than restricting people from walking outside at ... (read more)

As someone who leans towards hedonistic utilitarianism, I would agree with this impression. It seemed like the post asserted that utilitarianism must be true and that alternative intuitions could be dismissed without any good corresponding argument.

I would also add that there are many different flavors of utilitarianism, and it's unclear which, if any, is the correct theory to hold. This podcast has a good breakdown of the possibilities.

https://clearerthinkingpodcast.com/episode/042

I think this post makes many correct observations about the EA movement, but it draws the wrong conclusions.

For example, it's true that EAs will sometimes use uncommon phrases like "tail-risk" and "tractability". But that's because these are important concepts! Heck,  just "probability" is a word that might scare off most people too. But it would be a mistake to water down one's language to attract as many people as possible.

More generally, the EA movement isn't trying to grow as fast as possible. It's not trying to get everyone's attention. Instead, ... (read more)

Yes, I think it would be best to hold off. I think you'll find MacAskill addresses most of your concerns in his book.

I think you keep misinterpreting me, even when I make things explicit. For example, the mere fact that X is good doesn’t entail that people are immoral for not doing X.

Maybe it would be more productive to address arguments step by step.

Do you think it would be bad to hide a bomb in a populated area and set it to go off in 200 years?

If you agree we should help those who will have moral status, that's it. That's one of the main pillars of longtermism. Whether or not present and future moral status are "comparable" in some sense is beside the point. The important point of comparison is whether they both deserve to be helped, and they do.

Longtermists think we should help those who do (or will) have moral status.

No, it's because future moral status also matters.

FWIW this article has a direct account of persistence hunting among the Tarahumara. It also cites other accounts of persistence hunting among the Kalahari and Saami.

I think they will have moral status once they exist, and that's enough to justify acting for the sake of their welfare.

I disagree with the certainty you express, I'm not so sure, but that's a separate discussion, maybe for another time.

I haven't expressed certainty. It's possible to expect X to happen without being certain X will happen. Example: I expect for there to be another pandemic in the next century, but I'm not certain about it.

I assume then that you feel assured that whatever steps you take to prevent human extinction are also steps that you feel certain will work, am I right?

No, this is incorrect for the same reason as above.

The whole point of working on existen... (read more)

Yes, I do expect the future to contain future people. And I think it's important to make sure their lives go well.

Another crux seems to be that you think helping future people will involve some kind of radical sacrifice of people currently alive. This also doesn't follow.

Consider: People who are currently alive in Asia have moral status. People who are currently alive in Africa have moral status. It doesn't follow that there's any realistic scenario where we should sacrifice all the people in Asia for the sake of Africans or vice versa.

Likewise, there are actions we can take to help future generations without the kind of dramatic sacrifice of the present that you're envisioning. 

But why do longtermists think that the future should contain many billions of people and that it is our task to make those people's lives happier?

Different longtermists will have different answers to this.  For example, many people think they have an obligation to make sure their grandchildren's lives go well. It's a small step from there to say that other people in the future besides one's grandchildren are worth helping.

Or consider someone who buries a bomb in a park and sets the timer to go off in 200 years. It seems like that's wrong even though n... (read more)

I'm not following the reasoning for most of your claims, so I'll just address the main claims I understand and disagree with.

If longtermists truly believe that the future will contain a lot of people, then they consider that future inevitable.

This doesn't follow. There's a difference between saying "X will probably happen" and "X will inevitably happen."

Compare: Joe will probably get into a car accident in the next 10 years, so he should buy car insurance.

This is analogous to the longtermist position: There will probably be events that test the resilience ... (read more)

I don't think I'm following your reasoning.

It's true that longtermists expect for there to be many people in the future, but as far as I'm aware, no one has suggested taking any actions to make that number as large as possible. And no one has suggested we sacrifice the current 8 billion people alive today for some potential future benefit.

The main recommendations are to make sure that we survive the next century and that values aren't terrible in the future. This doesn't at all entail that people should hoard resources and fend for themselves. 

I appreciate the fact that you took the time to reflect on what you've heard about longtermism. That said, I'll highlight areas where I strongly disagree.

It is obvious that any plan that sacrifices the well-being of the present human population to serve a presumed larger future human population will not be morally justifiable

This is not at all obvious to me. We make justifiable sacrifices to well-being all the time. Consider a hospital that decides not to expend all of its resources on its current patients because it knows there will be future patients in ... (read more)

Then it becomes a choice of accepting the VNM axioms or proposition 3 above.

Like I said, I agree that we should reject 3, but the reason for rejecting 3 is not because it is based on intuition (or based on a non-fundamental intuition).  The reason is because it's a less plausible intuition relative to others. For example, one of the VNM axioms is transitivity: if A is preferable to B, and B is preferable to C, then A is preferable to C.

That's just much more plausible than the Yitz's suggestion that we shouldn't be "vulnerable to adversarial attacks" o... (read more)

Consider three propositions:

1. Expected value theory is true.
2. Expected value theory recommends sometimes taking bets that we expect to lose.
3. We should not adopt decision theories that recommend sometimes taking bets that we expect to lose.

You reject 3.

Yitz rejects 1.

This is not a matter of making more or fewer assumptions. Instead, it's a matter of weighing which of the propositions one finds least plausible. There may be further arguments to be made for or against any of these points, but it will eventually bottom out at intuitions.

Although I don't think Yitz's comment is persuasive, I don't think your response is either. What's the "logic-founded" reason for accepting the wager? You might say expected value theory, but then, it's possible to ask what the reason for that is, etc. It's intuition all the way down.

Good points, though it's worth noting that the people who comment on NYT articles are probably not representative of the typical NYT reader

In Amanda Askell's site, linked in another comment by ColdButtonIssues, she gives a reason to think an evidentialist god could be more likely: ‘Divine hiddenness’ plus God making us capable of evidentialism. Roughly, the idea is to ask the question, "Why would a god want us to irrationally believe in it?"

It's also plausible that people's beliefs in a supernatural punishing/rewarding god can be explained by evolutionary/cultural factors that wouldn't reliably track the truth.

This post left a bad taste in my mouth, and I wanted to briefly touch on why:

1. You say that the right time to act is now, but this is extremely ambiguous.

What should people do now? Maybe you're referring to some of the actions mentioned later in the post like "consciously deciding if this is worth your time" and "doing research".

This reminds me of a scene from Friends where one of the characters says that he has a plan. And his plan is that someone should come up with a new plan.

And there seems to be an inconsistency in your approach. You say there is a "... (read more)

Good post! Spencer Greenberg has a post with similar thoughts on this:

https://www.spencergreenberg.com/2021/05/is-learning-from-just-one-data-point-possible/