P

Pablo

9625 karmaJoined Aug 2014Working (6-15 years)Buenos Aires, Argentina
www.stafforini.com/

Bio

In an attempt to spend less time on the Forum, I am currently (December 2022) checking my account only once per week. If you message me or reply to one of my posts or comments and do not hear back from me, feel free to get in touch.

Also, please note that I decided to stop working on the EA Wiki in August 2022.   If you have a Wiki-related question or request,  you may want to reach out to Lizka (though feel free to message me if you believe I can help you despite no longer being formally involved with this project).

My favorite posts from 2022:

AGI and Lock-In

Climate Change & Longtermism

Effectiveness is a Conjunction of Multipliers

In favour of compassion, and against bandwagons of outrage

Most* small probabilities aren't pascalian

Rational predictions often update predictably

Replicating and extending the grabby aliens model

Space governance - problem profile

The importance of getting digital consciousness right

Wild animal welfare in the far future

Every post, comment, or Wiki edit I authored is hereby licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Sequences
1

Future Matters

Comments
1128

Topic Contributions
4107

Pablo
3d56

Thanks for the extended reply. I understand your position much better now.

On a meta note about communication, I think "Substituting non-animal protein with animal protein likely gets you closer to meeting all the Dietary Reference Intakes for vitamins" is more informative, less likely to be misinterpreted, and probably more persuasive than "Animal products are incredibly nutrient dense". (I offer this as a constructive criticism focused on one relatively minor point of how your post is written rather than as an objection to its substance.)

Pablo
3d40

Unfortunately, the Emacs package that integrates org-mode with Anki is very poorly maintained and I'm no longer using it for that reason. Currently, my approach is to keep the normal deck but document how to use the add-on, both in the GitHub repository and in the EA Forum post announcing the release of the new version.

Pablo
3d30

I have now uploaded a new deck with the relevant figures updated. Would you mind checking it out and telling me if it's working correctly? I might create a separate post to announce this new version, once I add a bunch of new cards people suggested, but feedback from early testers would be valuable.

Pablo
3d20

That's pretty cool—thanks for drawing this to my attention.

I thought of adding it to the EA numbers deck, but it looks like this will force users to install the add-on. Do you happen to know if there is a way of setting things up so that the deck works normally if the add-on isn't installed but provides the extra functionality for users who do have it installed? 

Pablo
5d40

It's on my TODO list. Feel free to leave another comment in a month if I don't update it (and keep leaving comments until I do).

EDIT (3 June 2023): Done.

Pablo
6d3731

Animal products are incredibly nutrient dense.

I agree with many points in this essay but was surprised by this claim. The claim is definitely not true if by "nutrient density" you mean "nutrients per calorie", which is how that expression is generally understood in the scientific literature. I think this is also the most relevant metric when comparing how much "bang for your buck" you get from eating different types of food: if you approach this as a problem of constrained optimization, where you are optimizing for health and nutrient content is regarded as the measure of healthfulness, energy (as measured in calories) rather than, say, volume or weight is ultimately the constraint you are dealing with.

Perhaps you meant something vaguer by "nutrient density", like "the degree to which a person's diet would move closer to meeting their nutritional needs if a portion of this particular food were added to it". Depending on how this idea is made more precise, the claim that "animal products are incredibly nutrient dense" might become more defensible. But this would need more elaboration and supporting evidence.

Pablo
6d118

EAs are privileged and underrate the need for equity

How do you reconcile this hypothesis with the huge importance EAs assign, relative to almost everyone else, to causes that typically affect even less privileged beings than the victims of injustice and inequity social justice and progressive folk normally focus on (i.e. oppressed people in rich countries and especially in the United States)? I'm thinking of "the bottom billion" people globally, nonhuman animals in factory farms, nonhuman animals in the wild (including invertebrates), digital minds (who may experience astronomical amounts of suffering), and future people (who may never exist). EAs may still exhibit major moral blindspots and failings, but if we do much better than most people (including most of our critics) in the most extreme cases, it is hard to see why we may be overlooking (as opposed to consciously deprioritizing) the most mundane cases.

Pablo
10d20

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm no longer working on the Wiki and I'm not sure there's currently someone designated to approve or provide feedback on the proposals. Maybe @Lizka can comment?

Protesting at leading AI labs may be significantly more effective than most protests, even ignoring the object-level arguments for the importance of AI safety as a cause area. The impact per protester is likely unusually big, since early protests involve only a handful of people and impact probably scales sublinearly with size. And very early protests are unprecedented and hence more likely (for their size) to attract attention, shape future protests, and have other effects that boost their impact.

Image
Two young men hold signs in front of a queue saying “don’t build AGI” and “our future, our choice.”

I thought the recent Hear This Idea podcast episode with Ben Garfinkel was excellent. If you are at all interested in AI governance (or AI safety generally), you probably want to check it out.

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