All of Ramiro's Comments + Replies

Reading this made me want to revoke my GWWC pledge (or at least cancel my account). I've been a pledger since 2018, and I will continue donating at least 10% of my income to the charities I find most effective and register it on a spreasheet. I just don't think it is appropriate that GWWC's operations take more credit than it's due for whatever good comes from this, and I would like to be sure they are not using my data - as I doubt that donation records go through rigorous reconciliation. I'd probably already have done it if GWWC webpage allowed it - at least I can find no "delete my account button".

This should have way more attention than it's currently receiving

Or: people care about relative income because: a) it entails more wealth (as capital gains accumulate faster than returns on work) which entails more power, like the possibility of funding intellectuals to say that inequality doesn't matter; and b) it signals status, or it is used to buy status-goods, such as buying a nice house in a rich neighborhood without fearing your neighbors wanting to sack it (since they might care about relative income, even if you don't)

Btw I just realized I can totally bite this bullet: I have lived in 4 cities in the last decad... (read more)

At least in this case, common sense might save thou a lot of time

Imagine someone receives a string of 95% of 111111... which is coming from a messenger funded by pro-Unity Inc., and when you point out that it might be biased because of its funding source, you hear the reply "oh but I only care about the message, and it's a sound string of 1's"

Don't you think a similar objection would apply to Caplan's "proof" that people don't move to poorer neighborhoods because something something externalities?

(Moreover, I just realized thata "realists say that people only care about relative wealth" is a remarkable strawman, and it's refutation does not entail that people barely care about relative income - and this is the first time I see an Economics professor mixing claims about wealth and income in the same argument)

Caplan says that Schooling is Mostly Signaling - Econlib
If I told him "since education in US is just about signaling, an American should move to a place where their degree + alma mater would be regarded as more valuable - e.g., a developing country, or a poorly educated area, etc.", d'you think he'd agree?

It reminded me this: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Wishes
 

Tbh, I barely care about what economists in Koch's pockets claim (something Caplan apparently doesn't consider worth denying)

Nuka zaria: research if Chatgpt is quoting from a parallel universe
 

(Well, it's already the cruelest month in UK, right?)

My conjecture is that you cannot fully separate MA and AI safety / alignment - or worse, solve AI safety first and then ask AI to solve values for you. We should solve them together, as some sets of values will be incompatible w some approaches to safety, and some AI development pathways will make some sets of values inaccessible (e.g., I don't think that an egalitarian world for our descendants is a likely outcome w the current trend)

Great post, thanks.
Did your search for a new intervention include control / eradication of NWS (C. hominivorax)? It's an endemic parasite in French Guayane (actually, I suspect that's where Coquerel first identified it in XIX century), affecting wild and farmed animals alike (and killing at the very least 100 humans/year), any large scale policy would eventually depend on / benefit from French (and perhaps EU) support, and almost no one is working on that from a animal welfare / rights POV (except for Screwworm Free Future is hiring for a Director — EA For... (read more)

Is Climate-sensitivity super-wrong?

Thomas Homer-Dixon on why James Hansen's latest climate findings matter

"The bottom line is startling: Hansen’s team argues that mainstream climate science, as reflected in the IPCC’s reports, underestimates climate sensitivity to CO2 by about 50 percent. Their research suggests that the “short-term”—century time scale—equilibrium warming from a doubling of CO2e should be 4.5 degrees C, not the standard estimate of 3 degrees.

The reason for this error, in the view of Hansen and his team, is that conventional climate science... (read more)

SBF was willing to bribe Trump w $5bi so he wouldn't run in 2024. That's not what I'd call "undervalue".

thanks. seems to be way better than the new Mission Impossible plot. you could send it to Nature Futures: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03507-x
 

Non-opioid painkiller wins approval

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the non-opioid painkiller suzetrigine for short-term pain management. Suzetrigine is the first pain drug given a regulatory nod in more than 20 years that works through a brand-new mechanism, without the risks of addiction or sedation. Unlike opioids, the drug doesn’t act in the brain, instead blocking certain sodium channels in pain-sensing cells in the peripheral nervous system. When it comes to chronic pain — where the need for safer, non-opioid alternatives is most pres... (read more)

Also, how much do sexing strains in SIT facilities reduce the cost of SIT?

Probably can't cut costs by more than half, right? Assuming the sex ratio is 1:1, now you can double the production of flies with the same input, I guess?

Sorry if I am being unfair, but itseems to me a bit naïve to base all of your Structural Democratic Reforms project solely on election theory, and ignore other institutions that are extremely impactful, but more neglected by and less accountable to the wide public, such as Supreme Courts, Central Banks and regulatory authorities (and even Audit Institutions).

Before the Hamas's attack, Israel was in political turmoil because a sort of constitutional crisis between its Supreme Court and the government regarding the 2023 Israeli judicial reform. Current US Su... (read more)

And public choice theory, too - the kind of "neoliberal cynic legalistic" branch of mechanism design. No point in having a great voting system if your authorities can benefit themselves scot-free.
It's funny how EAs have been arguing about "improving institutional decision-making" for almost a decade (and even before that in LW) w/o reading the basic literature... personal story: I remeber I was fascinated with EY's Inadequate Equilibria (a wonderful book I recommend even more than HPMOR) and found it super original... but actually it wasn't nothing new once I discovered the literature in mechanism desing and, more recently, cyberneticists like S. Beer and H. Simon

I'd like to see an updated version of this - and, if possible, one that didn't end up being categorized as "personal blog post"

Let me share SBTi's requests for feeddback:

 

Thanks for the post. I suppose you'd agree that there's a good chance that, once Uncle Sam gets unstable, many other countries will follow suit.

I'm not sure the problem is "EA neglects this" instead of something more like "SBF funded political campaigns and considered bribing Trump to avoid his re-election and this resulted in terrible optics..." Maybe EAs and politics don't mix well?

Thanks a lot for this answer

From the report:

The experts we spoke to favored unilateral advocacy (targeting individual countries) over advocacy in multilateral organizations such as the UN. This was on the basis that domestic policy and priorities usually take precedence over international agreements, especially in a catastrophe.

I tend to agree, because there are many low-hanging fruits in in-country advocacy. However,  I wonder if some food security policies could face obstacles from WTO's Agreement on Agriculture, so that amending it could be highly effective.

I call dibs on writing an April Fool's post to propose calling this pledge "effective tithe"

Before you comment in response to this post, I would urge you to assume that lawyers for the FTX Group will see your comments.

In that case, I suggest they consider taking a look at the Earning to Give part of 80000 hours website

I have a slightly less rosy picture of this report. Let me illustrate it with some excerpts:

1. The second SIR [Serious Incident Report]

Following the opening of the inquiry, the trustees filed a second SIR on 12 February 2023 as they became aware of a historic safeguarding incident involving one of the former trustees prior to that individual’s appointment as a trustee of the charity.

From the Findings:

The trustees then reviewed and updated their safeguarding policies and procedures and whilst these revised policies and procedures were generally in accordanc

you're already a record-breaker in my heart

Time to cancel my Asterisk subscription?

So Asterisk dedicates a whole self-aggrandizing issue to California, leaves EV for Obelus (what is Obelus?), starts charging readers, and, worst of all, celebrates low prices for eggs and milk?

Anyone else consders  the case of Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v. Switzerland (application no. 53600/20) of the European Court of Human Rights a possibly useful for GCR litigation?

I never said Stoics reflected on GCR

Elon Musk? So last year... 2024 is time for Trump scandals.
Let's buy some Truth shares and produce new scandals!

you can totally have scandals involving dead or imaginary people. So, definitely no.

I'm not sure where is the best place to share this, but I just received a message from GD that made think of Wenar's piece: John Cena warns us against giving cash with conditions | GiveDirectly (by Tyler Hall)
Ricky Stanicky is a comedy about three buddies who cover for their immature behavior by inventing a fictitious friend ‘Ricky’ as an alibi. [...]

When their families get suspicious, they hire a no-name actor (played by John Cena) to bring ‘Ricky’ to life, but an incredulous in-law grills Ricky about a specific Kenyan cash transfer charity he’d supposedl

As a civil servant from a developing country, I can say that those estimates mean almost nothing. I don't think they are well invested, and they are tiny in comparison to adaptation gaps
I think there's a huge problem of prioritization when it comes to adaptation investment - because developing countries seldom link infrastructure resilience to adaptation policies

Thinking about this one year later, I realize that Global Catastrophic events are much like Carnival in Brazil: unlivable climatic conditions, public services are shut down, traffic becomes impossible, crowds of crazy people roam randomly through the streets... but without Samba and beaches, of course (or, in the case of Curitiba, without zombies selling you beer)

but your song was actually written as an apolyptic message: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_(can%C3%A7%C3%A3o_de_Umberto_Tozzi)#:~:text=A%20letra%20da%20can%C3%A7%C3%A3o%20mistura%20fic%C3%A7%C3%A3o%20cient%C3%ADfica%20p%C3%B3s%2Dapocal%C3%ADptica%20com%20inspira%C3%A7%C3%A3o%20na%20B%C3%ADblia%20e%20%C3%A9%20narrada%20por%20um%20homem
 

For more, see this brilliant podcast: https://globoplay.globo.com/podcasts/episode/choque-de-cultura-ambiente-de-musica/7b0c4362-3a28-4ed4-be45-e6786aaba9f9/

How consistent are "global risk reports"?

We know that the track record of pundits is terrible, but many international consultancy firms have been publishing annual "global risks reports" like the WEF's, where they list the main global risks (e.g. top 10) for a certain period (e.g., 2y). Well, I was wondering if someone has measured their consistency; I mean, I suppose that if you publish in 2018 a list of the top 10 risks for 2019 & 2020, you should expect many of the same risks to show up in your 2019 report (i.e., if you are a reliable predictor, ris... (read more)

Let me briefly try to reply or clarify this:

I think there is a massive difference between one's best guess for the annual extinction risk^[1] being 1 % or 10^-10 (in policy and elsewhere). I guess you were not being literal? In terms of risk of personal death, that would be the difference between a non-Sherpa first-timer climbing Mount Everest^[2] (risky), and driving for 1 s^[3] (not risky).

I did say that I'm not very concerned with the absolute values of precise point-estimates, and more interested in proportional changes and in relative prob... (read more)

Something that surprised me a bit, but that is unlikely to affect your analysis:

I used Correlates of War’s data on annual war deaths of combatants due to fighting, disease, and starvation. The dataset goes from 1816 to 2014, and excludes wars which caused less than 1 k deaths of combatants in a year.

Actually, I'm not sure if this dataset is taking into account average estimates of excess deaths in Congo Wars (1996-2003, 1.5 million - 5.4 million) - and I'd like to check how it takes into account Latin American Wars of the 19th century.

Thanks for the post. I really appreciate this type of modeling exercise.

I've been thinking about this for a while, and there are some reflections it might be proper to share here. In summary, I'm afraid a lot of effort in x-risks might be misplaced. Let me share some tentative thoughts on this:

a) TBH, I'm not very concerned with precise values of point-estimates for the probability of human extinction. Because  of anthropic bias, or the fact that this is necessarily a one-time event, the incredible values involved, and doubts about how to extrapolate ... (read more)

Thanks for this report. It'll be quite useful.
I'd like to share some critical remarks I had previously sent RCG by e-mail:

1. Definition of “RCG”

<Los RCG se definen como aquellos con el potencial de infligir un daño grave al bienestar humano a escala global. > (p.2; cf. p. 6)

This definition might be too wide – it could include the global financial crisis of 2008, for instance. It is constrained, though, by the subsequent sentence: <Si bien se han identificado diversos riesgos que cumplen con esta definición, el presente trabajo se enfoca en ... (read more)

Opportunity for Austrians
Article by Seána Glennon: “In the coming week, thousands of households across Austria will receive an invitation to participate in a citizens’ assembly with a unique goal: to determine how to spend the €25 million fortune of a 31-year-old heiress, Marlene Engelhorn, who believes that the system that allowed her to inherit such a vast sum of money (tax free) is deeply flawed."

T20 Brasil | T20 BRASIL CALL FOR POLICY BRIEF ABSTRACTS: LET’S RETHINK THE WORLD
 

The T20 Brasil process will put forward policy recommendations to G20 officials involved in the Sherpa and Finance tracks in the form of a final communiqué and task forces recommendations.

To inform these documents, we are calling upon think tanks and research centres around the world – this invitation extends beyond G20 members – to build and/or reach out to their networks, share evidence, exchange ideas, and develop joint proposals for policy briefs. The latter should pu... (read more)

For me it's hard to believe that companies will spend much more with compliance thatn what they are already spending with marketing and offsets to greenwash their reputations. And when we implement carbon taxes / markets, they'll need to disclose that info anyway

Sorry for being contentious, but.... Cochrane is remarkably clever in his papers, but I fail to see cleverness here. For instance, one of his main rants is about SEC’s proposing that firms disclose their carbon footprint; it’d be financially irrelevant, right? However, there’s a strong consensus among economists and institutions on the need for higher carbon prices. So it’s expected that, in the long run, carbon intensive companies will pay more for their emissions; disclosing data on emissions is all about allowing investors to manage long-term financial ... (read more)

In case you're still interested in the subject: Consultative document - disclosure of climate-related financial risks (bis.org)
 

Idea for free (feel free to use, abuse, steal): a tool to automatize donations + birthday messages. Imagine a tool that captures your contacts and their corresponding birthdays from Facebook; then, you will make (or schedule) one (or more) donations to a number of charities, and the tool will customize birthday messages with a card mentioning that you donated $ in their honor and send it on their corresponding birthdays.

For instance: imagine you use this tool today; it’ll then map all the birthdays of your acquaintances for the next year. Then you’ll selec... (read more)