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 138
Comments2471
Topic contributions20
Lab grown meat -> no-kill meat
This tweet recommends changing the words we use to discuss lab-grown meat. Seems right.
I often think about transparency in relation to allies, competitors and others:
- Allies are on my team. We have shared norms and can make deals
- Competitors are not on my team and are either working against my interests or too chaotic to work with
- Others are randoms I don't know enough about.
Generally I feel obliged to be truthful to allies and others and transparent to allies. So I'd say I like EA to anyone, but I wouldn't feel the need to reveal it to any random person and particularly not someone who is against me.
What I think is more interesting from some of this discourse is that people see eg their government employers as competitors here. I think that would change the frame of how I went to work if I didn't think I was in a collaborative relationship with my boss.
Comment I wrote on Samuel's substack:
Medical innovation - Trump didn't really do a lot here last time he was in office. Seems like warp speed was motivated by covid.
Housing - Trump did't really do a lot here last time he was in office. Not sure we know Harris' policy here yet.
Immigration - I don't really trust Trump to manage some sort of clever compromise here
AI - Yeah, trump being worried could be better, but it's a random roll, against Biden being pretty sober.
This feels more like a desire to be controversial, than really weight the pros and cons. I think it's plausible that Trump is better, for AI reasons, and I don't think it's that unlikely, given the uncertainty, but I think it is unlikely.
I think this is an interesting kind of article, but I don't buy the AI point, which is the most cruxy one for me.
I made it up[1].
But, as I say in the following sentences it seems plausible to me that without betting markets to keep the numbers accessible and Silver to keep pushing on them, it would have taken longer for the initial crash to become visible, it could have faded from the news and it could have been hard to see that others were gaining momentum.
All of these changes seem to increase the chance of biden staying in, which was pretty knife edgy for a long time.
I am happy to see this. Have you messaged people on the EA and epistemics slack?
Here are some epistemics projects I am excited about:
- Polymarket and Nate Silver - It looks to me that forecasting was 1 - 5% of the Democrats dropping Biden from their ticket. Being able to rapidly see the drop in his % chance of winning during the debate, holding focus on this poor performance over the following weeks and seeing momentum increase for other candidates all seemed powerful[1].
- X Community Notes - that one of the largest social media platforms in the world has a truth seeking process with good incentives is great. For all Musk's faults, he has pushed this and it is to his credit. I think someone should run a think tank to lobby X and other orgs into even better truth seeking
- The Swift Centre - large conflict of interest, since I forecast for them, but as a forecasting consultancy that is managing to stand largely (entirely?) without grant funding, just getting standard business gigs, if I were gonna suggest epistemics consulting, I'd probably recommend us. The Swift Centre is a professional or that has worked with DeepMind and the Open Nuclear Network.
- Discourse mapping - Many discussions happen often and we don't move forward. Personally I'm really excited about trying to find consensus positions to allow focus to be freed for more important stuff. Here is the site my team mocked up for Control AI, but I think we could have similar discourse mapping for SB 1047, different approaches to AI safety
- The Forum's AI Welfare Week - I enjoyed a week of focus on a single topic. I reckon if we did about 10 of these we might really start to get somewhere. Perhaps with clustering on different groups based on their positions on initial spectra.
- Sage's Fatebook.io - a tool for quickly making and tracking forecasts. The only tool I've found that I show to non-forecasting business people that they say "oh what's that, can I use that". I think Sage should charge for this and try and push it as a standard SaaS product.[2]
And a quick note:
An example of a potential project here: A consultancy which provides organisations support in improving their epistemics.
I think the obvious question here should be "how would you know such a consultancy has good epistemics".
As a personal note, I've been building epistemic tools for years, eg estimaker.app or casting around for forecasting questions to write on. The FTXFF was pretty supportive of this stuff, but since it's fall I've not felt like big EA finds my work particularly interesting or worthy of support. Many of the people I see doing interesting tinkering work like this end up moving to AI Safety.
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.