Nathan Young

Product Management @ Forecasting Consultancy
14783 karmaJoined May 2019Working (0-5 years)London, UK

Bio

Participation
4

Create prediction markets and forecasting questions on AI risk and biorisk. I also work part-time at a prediction market.

Use my connections on Twitter to raise the profile of these predictions and increase the chance that decision-makers discuss these issues.

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.

Sequences
1

Moving In Step With One Another

Comments
2219

Topic contributions
19

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.

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 were in slave owning times I should have divested entirely" but I dunno these days. Probably my anti-slavery resources were better spent first and foremost funding abolitionists. I don't know the exact costs
  • Frustration - I find this story sort of a bit insane. It's about someone I know who is very kind tying themselves in knots over over a few hundred hours of micro-consciousness. I have a voice of a friend in my head being like "that's an insane story" and for myself I'd allow it a bit but at some point I think I'd say that it isn't the best way to help moths or all consciousness and that most minds would agree with the parts of me that want to throw in the towel
  • Sadness - I'm sad that you are sad, especially after trying to be so kind. And I agree that it's weird how we behave to people who we maybe think are doing bad things like the insect guy. 

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? 

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