Nathan Young
Bio
Participation4
Builds web apps (eg viewpoints.xyz) and makes forecasts. Currently I have spare capacity.
How others can help me
Talking to those in forecasting to improve my forecasting question generation tool
Writing forecasting questions on EA topics.
Meeting EAs I become lifelong friends with.
How I can help others
Connecting them to other EAs.
Writing forecasting questions on metaculus.
Talking to them about forecasting.
Posts 144
Comments2561
Topic contributions20
@Gavriel Kleinwaks (who works in this area) Gives her recommendation. When asked whether she "backed" them:
I do! (Not in the financial sense, tbc.) But just want to flag that my endorsement is confounded. Basically, Aerolamp uses the design of the nonprofit referenced in my post, OSLUV, and most of my technical info about far-UV comes from a) Aerolamp cofounder Viv Belenky and b) OSLUV. I've been working with Viv and OSLUV for a couple of years, long before the founding of Aerolamp, and trust their information, but you should know that my professional opinion is highly correlated with theirs—1Day Sooner doesn't have the equipment to do independent testing.
I think it's the ideal outcome that a bunch of excellent researchers took a look at the state of the field and made their own product. So I'm not too worried about relying on this team's info, but you should just have that context.
Fwiw, Mox (moxsf.com), run by Austin Chen, has installed a couple of Aerolamps and they were easy to set up and are running smoothly.
Sure, and do you want to stand on any of those accusations? I am not going to argue the point with 2 blogposts. What is the point you think is the strongest?
As for Moskovitz, he can do as he wishes, but I think it was an error. I do think that ugly or difficult topics should be discussed and I don't fear that. LessWrong, and Manifest, have cut okay lines through these topics in my view. But it's probably too early to judge.
Option B clearly provides no advantage to the poor people over Option A. On the other hand, it sure seems like Option A provides an advantage to the poor people over Option B.
This isn't clear to me.
If the countries in question have been growing much slower than the S&P 500, then the money at the future point might be far more money to them than it is to them now. And they aren't going to invest in the S&P 500 in the meantime.
Interesting take. I don't like it.
Perhaps because I like saying overrated/underrated.
But also because overrated/underrated is a quick way to provide information. "Forecasting is underrated by the population at large" is much easier to think of than "forecasting is probably rated 4/10 by the population at large and should be rated 6/10"
Over/underrated requires about 3 mental queries, "Is it better or worse than my ingroup thinks" "Is it better or worse than my ingroup thinks?" "Am I gonna have to be clear about what I mean?"
Scoring the current and desired status of something requires about 20 queries "Is 4 fair?" "Is 5 fair" "What axis am I rating on?" "Popularity?" "If I score it a 4 will people think I'm crazy?"...
Like in some sense your right that % forecasts are more useful than "More likely/less likely" and sizes are better than "bigger smaller" but when dealing with intangibles like status I think it's pretty costly to calculate some status number, so I do the cheaper thing.
Also would you prefer people used over/underrated less or would you prefer the people who use over/underrated spoke less? Because I would guess that some chunk of those 50ish karma are from people who don't like the vibe rather than some epistemic thing. And if that's the case, I think we should have a different discussion.
I guess I think that might come from a frustration around jargon or rationalists in general. And I'm pretty happy to try and broaden my answer from over/underrated - just as I would if someone asked me how big a star was and I said "bigger than an elephant". But it's worth noting it's a bandwidth thing and often used because giving exact sizes in status is hard. Perhaps we shouldn't have numbers and words for it, but we don't.