All of PeterMcCluskey's Comments + Replies

We shouldn't be focused too heavily on what is politically feasible this year. A fair amount of our attention should be on what to prepare in order to handle a scenario in which there's more of an expert consensus a couple of years from now.

I participated in XPT, and have a post on LessWrong about it.

I have alexithymia.

Greater awareness seems desirable. But I doubt it "severely affects" 1 in 10 people. My impression is that when it's correlated with severe problems, the problems are mostly caused by something like trauma, and alexithymia is more a symptom than a cause of the severe problems.

It's not obvious that unions or workers will care as much about safety as management. See this post for some historical evidence.

6 months sounds like a guess as to how long the leading companies might be willing to comply.

The timing of the letter could be a function of when they were able to get a few big names to sign.

I don't think they got enough big names to have much effect. I hope to see a better version of this letter before too long.

Something important seems missing from this approach.

I see many hints that much of this loneliness results from trade-offs made by modern Western culture, neglecting (or repressing) tightly-knit local community ties to achieve other valuable goals.

My sources for these hints are these books:

• The Amish
• WEIRDest People
• The Explanation of Ideology
• The Geography of Thought

One point from WEIRDest People is summarized here:

Neolocal residence occurs when a newly married couple establishes their home independent of both sets of relatives. While only about 5%

I doubt most claims about sodium causing health problems. High sodium consumption seems quite correlated with dietary choices that have other problems, which makes studying this hard.

See Robin Hanson's comments.

I expect most experts are scared of the political difficulties. Also, many people have been slow to update on the declining costs of solar. I think there's still significant aversion to big energy-intensive projects. Still, it does seem quite possible that experts are rejecting it for good reasons, and it's just hard to find descriptions of their analysis.

I agree very much with your guess that SBF's main mistake was pride.

I still have some unpleasant memories from the 1984 tech stock bubble, of being reluctant to admit that my successes during the bull market didn't mean that I knew how to handle all market conditions.

I still feel some urges to tell the market that it's wrong, and to correct the market by pushing up prices of fallen stocks to where I think they ought to be. Those urges lead to destructive delusions. If my successes had gotten the kind of publicity that SBF got, I expect that I would have made mistakes that left me broke.

I haven't expected EAs to have any unusual skill at spotting risks.

EAs have been unusual at distinguishing risks based on their magnitude. The risks from FTX didn't look much like the risk of human extinction.

I agree that there's a lot of hindsight bias here, but I don't think that tweet tells us much.

My question for Dony is: what questions could we have asked FTX that would have helped? I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have detected any problems by grilling FTX. Maybe I'd have gotten some suspicions by grilling people who'd previously worked with SBF, but I can't think of what would have prompted me to do that.

Nitpick: I suspect EAs lean more toward Objective Bayesianism than Subjective Bayesianism. I'm unclear whether it's valuable to distinguish between them.

It's risky to connect AI safety to one side of an ideological conflict.

Convincing a venue to implement it well (or rewarding one that has already done that) will have benefits that last more than three days.

I agree about the difficulty of developing major new technologies in secret. But you seem to be mostly overstating the problems with accelerating science. E.g.:

These passages seem to imply that the rate of scientific progress is primarily limited by the number and intelligence level of those working on scientific research. Here it sounds like you're imagining that the AI would only speed up the job functions that get classified as "science", whereas people are suggesting the AI would speed up a wide variety of tasks including gathering evidence, building tools, etc.

My understanding of Henrich's model says that reducing cousin marriage is a necessary but hardly sufficient condition to replicate WEIRD affluence.

European culture likely had other features which enabled cooperation on larger-than-kin-network scales. Without those features, a society that stops cousin marriage could easily end up with only cooperation within smaller kin networks. We shouldn't be confident that we understand what the most important features are, much less that we can cause LMICs to have them.

Successful societies ought to be risk-averse abou... (read more)

Resilience seems to matter for human safety mainly via food supply risks. I'm not too concerned about that, because the world is producing a good deal more food than is needed to support our current population. See my more detailed analysis here.

It's harder to evaluate the effects on other species. I expect a significant chance that technological changes will make current biodiversity efforts irrelevant. So to the limited extent I'm worried about wild animals, I'm focused more on ensuring that technological change develops so as to keep as many options open as possible.

Why has this depended on NIH? Why aren't some for-profit companies eager to pursue this?

This seems to nudge people in a generally good direction.

But the emphasis on slack seems somewhat overdone.

My impression is that people who accomplish the most typically have had small to moderate amounts of slack. They made good use of their time by prioritizing their exploration of neglected questions well. That might create the impression of much slack, but I don't see slack as a good description of the cause.

One of my earliest memories of Eliezer is him writing something to the effect that he didn't have time to be a teenager (probably on the Extropian... (read more)

This seems mostly right, but it still doesn't seem like the main reason that we ought to talk about global health.

There are lots of investors visibly trying to do things that we ought to expect will make the stock market more efficient. There are still big differences between companies in returns on R&D or returns on capital expenditures. Those returns go mainly to people who can found a Moderna or Tesla, not to ordinary investors.

There are not (yet?) many philanthropists who try to make the altruistic market more efficient. But even if there were, the... (read more)

Can you give any examples of AI safety organizations that became less able to get funding due to lack of results?

Worrying about the percent of spending misses the main problems, e.g. donors who notice the increasing grift become less willing to trust the claims of new organizations, thereby missing some of the best opportunities.

I have some relevant knowledge. I was involved in a relevant startup 20 years ago, but haven't paid much attention to this area recently.

My guess is that Drexlerian nanotech could probably be achieved in less than 10 years, but would need on the order of a billion dollars spent on an organization that's at least as competent as the Apollo program. As long as research is being done by a few labs that have just a couple of researchers, progress will likely continue to be slow to need much attention.

It's unclear what would trigger that kind of spending and th... (read more)

Acting without information on the relative effectiveness of the vaccine candidates was not a feasible strategy for mitigating the pandemic.

I'm pretty sure that with a sufficiently bad virus, it's safer to vaccinate before effectiveness is known. We ought to plan ahead for how to make such a decision.

This was the fastest vaccine rollout ever

Huh? 40 million doses of the 1957 flu vaccine were delivered within about 6 months of getting a virus sample to the US. Does that not count due to its similarity to existing vaccines?

Here are some of my reasons for disliking high inflation, which I think are similar to the reasons of most economists:

Inflation makes long-term agreements harder, since they become less useful unless indexed for inflation.

Inflation imposes costs on holding wealth in safe, liquid forms such as bank accounts, or dollar bills. That leads people to hold more wealth in inflation-proof forms such as real estate, and less in bank accounts, reducing their ability to handle emergencies.

Inflation creates a wide variety of transaction costs: stores need to change the... (read more)

I don't see high value ways to donate money for this. The history of cryonics suggests that it's pretty hard to get more people to sign up. Cryonics seems to grow mainly from peer pressure, not research or marketing.

I expect speed limits to hinder the adoption of robocars, without improving any robocar-related safety.

There's a simple way to make robocars err in the direction of excessive caution: hold the software company responsible for any crash it's involved in, unless it can prove someone else was unusually reckless. I expect some rule resembling that will be used.

Having speed limits on top of that will cause problems, due to robocars having to drive slower than humans drive in practice (annoying both the passengers and other drivers), when it's safe for them to ... (read more)

How much of this will become irrelevant when robocars replace human drivers? I suspect the most important impact of safety rules will be how they affect the timing of that transition. Additional rules might slow that down a bit.

CFTC regulations have been at least as much of an obstacle as gambling laws. It's not obvious whether the CFTC would allow this strategy.

You're mostly right. But I have some important caveats.

The Fed acted for several decades as if it was subject to political pressure to reduce inflation. Economists mostly agree that the optimal inflation rate is around 2%. Yet from 2008 to about 2019 the Fed acted as if that were an upper bound, not a target.

But that doesn't mean that we always need more political pressure for inflation. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a fair amount of political pressure to increase monetary stimulus by whatever it took to reduce unemployment. That worked well when infla... (read more)

Hanson reports estimates that under our current system, elites have about 16 times as much influence as the median person.

My guess is that under futarchy, the wealthy would have somewhere between 2 and 10 times as much influence on outcomes that are determined via trading.

You seem to disagree with at least one of those estimates. Can you clarify where you disagree?

The original approach was rather erratic about finding high value choices, and was weak at identifying the root causes of the biggest mistakes.

So participants would become more rational about flossing regularly, but rarely noticed that they weren't accomplishing much when they argued at length with people who were wrong on the internet. The latter often required asking embarrassing questions their motives, and sometimes realizing that they were less virtuous than assumed. People will, by default, tend to keep their attention away from questions like that.

T... (read more)

To the best of my knowledge, internal CEAs rarely if ever turn up negative.

Here's one example of an EA org analyzing the effectiveness of their work, and concluding the impact sucked:

CFAR in 2012 focused on teaching EAs to be fluent in Bayesian reasoning, and more generally to follow the advice from the Sequences. CFAR observed that this had little impact, and after much trial and error abandoned large parts of that curriculum.

This wasn't a quantitative cost-effectiveness analysis. It was more a subjective impression of "we're not getting good enough re... (read more)

It seems strange to call populism anti-democratic.

My understanding is that populists usually want more direct voter control over policy. The populist positions on immigration and international trade seem like stereotypical examples of conflicts where populists side with the average voter more than do the technocrats who they oppose.

Please don't equate anti-democratic with bad. It seems mostly good to have democratic control over the goals of public policy, but let's aim for less democratic control over factual claims.

I doubt that that study was able to tell whether the dietary changes improved nutrition. They don't appear to have looked at many nutrients, or figured out which nutrients the subjects were most deficient in. Even if they had quantified all important nutrients in the diet, nutrients in seeds are less bioavailable than nutrients in animal products (and that varies depending on how the seeds are prepared).

There's lots of somewhat relevant research, but it's hard to tell which of it is important, and maybe hard for the poor to figure out whether they ought ... (read more)

Could much of the problem be due to the difficulty of starting treatment soon enough after infection?

I see some important promise in this idea, but it looks really hard to convert the broad principles into something that's both useful, and clear enough that a lawyer could decide whether his employer was obeying it.

10 years worth of cash sounds pretty unusual, at least for an EA charity.

But part of my point is that when stocks are low, the charity won't have enough of a cushion to do any investing, so it won't achieve the kind of returns that you'd expect from buying stocks at a no-worse-than-random time. E.g. I'd expect that a charity that tries to buy stocks would have bought around 2000 when the S&P was around 1400, sold some of that in 2003 when the S&P was around 1100 to make up for a shortfall in donations, bought again in 2007 at 1450, then sold again ... (read more)

1. Cash sitting in a charity bank account costs money, so if you have lots of it, invest some;

But the obvious ways to invest (i.e. stocks) work poorly when combined with countercyclical spending. Charities are normally risk-averse about investments because they have plenty of money to invest when stocks are high, but need to draw down reserves when stocks are low.

When I tell people that prisons and immigration should use a similar mechanism, they sometimes give me a look of concern. This concern is based on a misconception

I'll suggest that some people's concerns are due to an accurate intuition that your proposal will make it harder to hide the resemblance between prisons and immigration restrictions. Preventing immigration looks to me to be fairly similar to imprisoning them in their current country.

It would be much easier to make a single, more generic policy statement. Something like:

When in doubt, assume that most EAs agree with whatever opinions are popular in London, Berkeley, and San Francisco.

Or maybe:

When in doubt, assume that most EAs agree with the views expressed by the most prestigious academics.

Reaffirming this individually for every controversy would redirect attention (of whatever EAs are involved in the decision) away from core EA priorities.

Another risk is that increased distrust impairs the ability of authorities to do test and trace in low-income neighborhoods, which seem to now be key areas where the pandemic is hardest to control.

EA is in danger of making itself a niche cause by loudly focusing on topics like x-risk

EA has been a niche cause, and changing that seems harder than solving climate change. Increased popularity would be useful, but shouldn't become a goal in and of itself.

If EAs should focus on climate change, my guess is that it should be a niche area within climate change. Maybe altering the albedo of buildings?

How about having many locations that are open only to people who are running a tracking app?

I'm imagining that places such as restaurants, gyms, and airplanes could require that people use tracking apps in order to enter. Maybe the law should require that as a default for many locations, with the owners able to opt out if they post a conspicuous warning?

How hard would this be to enforce?

Hmm. Maybe you're right. I guess I was thinking there was an important difference between "constant leverage" and infrequent rebalancing. But I guess that's a more complicated subject.

See Colby Davis on the problems with leveraged ETFs.

I like this post a good deal.

However, I think you overstate the benefits.

I like the idea of shorting the S&P and buying global ex-US stocks, but beware that past correlations between markets only provide a rough guess about future correlations.

I'm skeptical that managed futures will continue to do as well as backtesting suggests. Futures are new enough that there's likely been a moderate amount of learning among institutional investors that has been going on over the past couple of decades, so those markets are likely more efficient now than history su

Nearly all of CFAR's activity is motivated by their effects on people who are likely to impact AI. As a donor, I don't distinguish much between the various types of workshops.

There are many ways that people can impact AI, and I presume the different types of workshop are slightly optimized for different strategies and different skills, and differ a bit in how strongly they're selecting for people who have a high probability of doing AI-relevant things. CFAR likely doesn't have a good prediction in advance about whether any individual person will prioritize AI, and we shouldn't expect them to try to admit only those with high probabilities of working on AI-related tasks.