All of Robi Rahman's Comments + Replies

There are tons of people vaguely considering working on alignment, and not a lot of people actually working on alignment.

Sorry, yes, didn't mean to imply Charles He was only talking about catering. I was just using that as an example of EAs following vegan diets in a way that costs more money, as opposed to costlessly. This post by Jeff Kaufman is relevant, https://www.jefftk.com/p/two-kinds-of-vegan :

"Go vegan!", you hear, "it's cheaper, more environmentally sustainable, and just as healthy and delicious!" The problem is, these aren't all true at the same time.

The specific points being made in those quotations aren't mutually exclusive. Onni Aarne is saying you can make very inexpensive adjustments to your diet that greatly reduce animal suffering, and Charles He is saying that EA events spend extra money on catering to satisfy the constraint of making it vegan. I think both claims are correct.

The two are disanalogous from an offsetting perspective: Eating (factory farmed) animal products relatively directly results in an increase in animal suffering, and there is nothing that you can do to "undo" that suffering, even if you can "offset" it by donating to animal advocacy orgs. By contrast, if you cause some emissions and then pay for that amount of CO2 to be directly captured from the atmosphere, you've not harmed a single being.

This is only reasonable if you believe that causing x units of suffering and then preventing x units of suffering i... (read more)

[Objection] from Robi Rahman: “A person choosing to eat 1kg less chicken results in 0.6 kg less expected chicken produced in the long run, which averts 20 days of chicken suffering. A comparable sacrifice would be to turn off your air conditioning for 3 days, which in expectation reduces future global warming by 10^(-14) °C and reduces suffering by zero.”

Without quibbling with the precise numbers, I think this is fundamentally a point about the importance of the two cause areas.

Actually, what I meant was fundamentally not a point about the importan... (read more)

However, whether this means EAs are not allocating their resources appropriately requires consideration of the marginal cost-effectiveness of: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Actually, it doesn't require knowing all of those! If you find that among two of those options, one is more cost-effective than the other, but resources are going to the less effective one, you already know the overall allocation is suboptimal (even though the optimal allocation is probably some entirely different option).

That's a main point of this essay, which I think is underappreciated througho... (read more)

I question your economic analysis of meat-eating:

your reduction in demand for meat makes them cheaper for others, which will lead some to increase in their consumption...

Following this logic the amount of consumption of any given non-essential good would never change.

You've misunderstood the line you quoted. It's only saying that other people's meat consumption will increase by some fraction of the amount you've reduced your consumption, not that people will increase their consumption by however much you reduce yours.

Intermediary German, Basic Spanish & Russian

Intermediate, not intermediary.

Have you heard of this idea? Unique entity ethics: http://allegedwisdom.blogspot.com/2021/05/unique-entity-ethics-solves-repugnant.html

Someone referred me to apply to be a TA for this program. How would you like such people to contact you - should I email you, or is there another form for that?

Ah, you're right, I misinterpreted it since the epistemic status suggestion said time per post and that one didn't.

Speculative: NLP for claim detection: the site asks you for your probabilities about the main claims. Time cost: 30 mins.

You think it'd take only 30 minutes to implement a feature that detects claims in forum posts? I'm not a web developer but that strikes me as wildly optimistic.

If you think pandemic response is the key issue, Dr. Harder is a highly experienced doctor who used to run the Oregon Medical Board. Medical and policy experience: maybe you still think your guy will be better, but by how much?

The FDA has hundreds of highly -experienced doctors and still had such a disastrous response to the pandemic they probably caused millions of extra deaths. They completely blocked challenge trials and delayed vaccine deployment by six months. What matters is not whether the people in government are doctors, it's the policies on ho... (read more)

Mormonism is an obvious example of a religion that people join because Mormons have well-functioning families? I'm skeptical that's a main reason for the growth of Mormonism compared to their high birthrate or their amount of missionary effort.

Did anyone ever end up creating a hiring agency?

Even a comparatively low pure discount rate of 1% implies most future value is concentrated in the next hundred years

This is not correct! Suppose the human population grows at a constant rate for 1000 years. If you discount the moral worth of future people by 1% per year, but the growth rate is anything above 1%, most of the value of humanity is concentrated in the last hundred years, not the first hundred years.

There's this very surprising, maybe counterintuitive moral implication of cosmopolitanism where if you think future people have moral value and yo... (read more)

I'm strongly in favor of 'welfaretarianism'! It's been my diet* for a few years now and I'm really glad you invented a name for it. I've been telling people for ages that I agree you shouldn't eat animals that suffer while farmed if it causes more of them to exist, but people don't really internalize the logical conclusion of this, that it's good to eat animals if it causes happy animals to exist (assuming you don't subscribe to negative utilitarianism or the person-affecting view) or existing animals to become happier. Hypothetically, if it were more prof... (read more)

I'm guessing they went to Colorado because they were on the west coast and it was the closest state with legal sports betting.

Thanks for writing this sequence. I have gotten some weird looks in my discussion group last year for not being a moral realist - wish I'd had this link handy back then!

EV is the same, you're just reducing volatility (risk is maybe a better word?) by guaranteeing the outcome either way.

Oh, I see. Yes, this is what I thought - the EV doesn't change but you can reduce your exposure to particular outcomes.

I'm glad you didn't see my post until now! I am a bit lazy and your writeup is a little more detailed than mine :) plus, I didn't emphasize enough that this is available to people outside of New York, although I think the recent NY legalization is why it is so especially lucrative right now.

To my knowledge, you are generally right. The situation is exceptional this month because the market was just legalized and these sites are trying to grab market share while it's brand new.

Yeah, here are some examples. I was in NYC from 5pm Saturday to 7pm Sunday.

I signed up for the BetRivers match promo. They asked me to verify my identity by uploading a photocopy of my driver's license (I used my passport, which was accepted). Upon depositing $250, they gave me $250 in matching funds. The soonest upcoming sports game was the Kansas City Chiefs vs the Buffalo Bills, which was at -110 moneyline odds (meaning the Chiefs were 55% favorites according to the sportsbook). FiveThirtyEight had them as 65% favored, so I bet on the Chiefs. They won, ... (read more)

It is not negative EV. You are either misunderstanding the offer or someone's example.

I used the maximum EV you can get without risking any of your own money. If you want to have less exposure to outcomes, you can choose lower-EV bets with higher likelihood of payouts, but if you're doing this for charity, it doesn't really make sense to do that.

For example, suppose you have a $1000 free bet. It doesn't pay out the principal if you win, just returns payouts for whatever you bet on. You can bet on an outcome that is 91% likely, in which case you have a 91% chance of winning $100 and a 9% chance of winning nothing, for an EV of $91. Or you co... (read more)

Why is it optimal to size the hedge bet such that you get the same payout for either outcome? Why does that have greater EV than if the bets are skewed in either direction?

Yes, this was something I was thinking earlier. I was in an ideal position to take advantage of the offers without getting hooked because: I hate sports, have good background knowledge of probability, don't like gambling, and don't live in NY and thus couldn't make any more bets even if I wanted to. If I'm the one taking these offers rather than a NY resident who might end up with a gambling problem, that's a very good social outcome in addition to the donation directed to charity.

Physical presence is enough. They have geolocation applets on their site and prohibit you from placing bets unless you are in an eligible location. I live in Massachusetts but went to NYC for about a day. I used my passport for identification because I didn't bring my driving license.

Correct. They might ban you and confiscate your money if you use a VPN to obfuscate your location.

This pays far too little to the winners to make it worthwhile to have any money in this. It wouldn't have much more liquidity than a moneyless prediction book.

Oh, good catch, I will edit that. What is the EV from those offers, then? It seems to still be nearly +$1000 and nearly risk-free with the following approach: bet $1000 on something very unlikely (EV of the payout will be $1000, but as something like a 1% chance of $100000). If you lose, bet the $1000 of site credit on something extremely likely, so you end up with $1000 cash. Then withdraw that.

For BetMGM, repeat the same approach but do 5x very safe bets of $200 with the site credits.

That still works for $1000 expected profit, right?

I'd guess a couple more weeks. The Caesars one was just reduced from $3000 to $1500. They were most generous right at the beginning of legal online betting but are decreasing the incentives as everyone who will end up signing up has done so.

Yes, that's correct. Optimal usage of that offer is to deposit $1,500, use the free bet on an unlikely event that resolves very soon, and then withdraw your deposit quickly, plus winnings if any.

Good point, thanks! I added a note in the FAQ.

I disagree with your point about participants not being cautious enough about covid. Last I heard (someone correct me if this was later updated), four attendees tested positive during or after the conference, out of about 900 participants. That is an impressively low rate, and indicates that the safety measures worked well! I want to commend the organizers for doing a great job addressing covid issues: they had lots of rapid tests available for us, gave lots of advice about travel safety, and didn't do anything excessive or unwarranted by the risk level, like cancelling the conference or social-distancing the discussions.

I've heard this for e.g. server uptime as well.

I thought the person-affecting view only applies to acts, not states of the world. I don't hold the PAV but my impression was that someone who does would agree that creating an additional happy person in World A is morally neutral, but wouldn't necessarily say that Worlds B and C aren't better than World A.

I'd love to read such a post.

The steady-state population assumption is my biggest objection here. Everything you've written is correct yet I think that one premise is so unrealistic as to render this somewhat unhelpful as a model. (And as always, NPV of the eternal future varies a crazy amount even within a small range of reasonable discount rates, as your numbers show.)

If the financial capital is $46B and the population is 10k, the average person's career capital is worth about ~$5M of direct impact (as opposed to the money they'll donate)? I have a wide confidence interval but that seems reasonable. I'm curious to see how many people currently going into EA jobs will still be working on them 30 years later.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that biorisk does or doesn't have "fast timelines" in the same sense as some AI forecasts. I was responding to the point about "if [EA organization] is a good use of funds, why doesn't OpenPhil fund it?" being answered with the proposition that OpenPhil is not funding much stuff in the present (disbursing 1% of their assets per year, a really small rate even if you are highly patient) because they think they will find better things to fund in the future. That seems like a wrong explanation.

> At face value, [an EA organization] seems great. But at the meta-level, I still have to ask, if [organization] is a good use of funds, why doesn't OpenPhil just fund it?

Open Phil doesn’t fund it because they think they can find opportunities that are 10-100x more cost-effective in the coming years.

This is highly implausible. First of all, if it's true, it implies that instead of funding things, they should just do fundraising and sit around on their piles of cash until they can discover these opportunities.

But it also implies they have (in my opinion,... (read more)

I noticed something at EAG London which I want to promote to someone's conscious attention. Almost no one at the conference was overweight, even though the attendees were mostly from countries with  overweight and obesity rates ranging from 50-80% and 20-40% respectively. I estimate that I interacted with 100 people, of whom 2 were overweight. Here are some possible explanations; if the last one is true, it is potentially very concerning:

1. effective altruism is most common among young people, who have lower rates of obesity than the general populatio... (read more)

Additional suggestion: don't just have a photo of your vaccine card on your phone; physically bring it or scan and print a copy.

Thanks for the writeup! I'm following this process but going to the UK a few days earlier, so I'll try this out and provide results before you leave.

I ordered a 2-day covid test and received a booking reference number. My flight arrives in London on Friday, so tomorrow morning I will fill out the passenger locator form.

Edit, 2021-10-20: Submitted all my info to the UK gov website and got a passenger locator form. I'll update tomorrow when boarding the plane.

2021-10-21: will be departing from the US for the UK on Thursday evening.

2021-10-22: will be arriving in London on Friday morning.