All of Ryan Beck's Comments + Replies

One thing worth noting is that extinction and extreme economic collapse were excluded from all except 2 questions (GDP and total population) to make the forecasts more interpretable (more info on this in the appendix). This might explain some of the confidence you see, though it also might not!

This comment was copied from a reply I made on the EA forecasting and epistemics slack.

Thanks, I'll check that out!

My two cents on a couple of these from the perspective of a father of two girls (4 years old and 2 years old, I'm 30). Just my perspective, feel free to disregard if not helpful!

On emotions and discipline, I'm also a very calm person and rarely show anger and frustration. But kids are really good at finding was to frustrate you. I almost never yell at them, but I do get frustrated or exasperated and raise my voice, and it's genuinely unclear to me how anyone could parent a child without doing that.

In general I think the military wisdom "no plan survives fi... (read more)

I always interpreted the 10% as a goal, not a requirement for EA. That's a pretty high portion for a lot of people. I worry that making that sound like a cutoff makes EA seem even more inaccessible.

The way I had interpreted the community message was more like "an EA is someone that thinks about where their giving would be most effective or spends time working on the world's most pressing problems."

Thanks for writing this, as a new-ish user of the forum it's been frustrating trying to find previous posts that address questions I have or things I want to learn more about, only to find sprawling or multi-part posts with half hour or longer read-times that may or may not address the specific thing I'm interested in.

Also you mentioned jargon and I think there's room for a lot of improvement there, it seems to me like there's more jargon than is justified and it made the forum daunting for me. This previous post has some good recommendations and in my opi... (read more)

Great post as usual.

It looks like your Putin's health link goes to the wrong forecast.

I've found this short article useful in explaining the case for it. Basically it says that a guarantee of defense could embolden Taiwan to more aggressively pursue independence which could provoke China, while committing to not interfere could embolden China to invade. The US benefits from better relations with both countries if it walks a line between them and it may be better for peace between them if Taiwan has to tread carefully and China expects a high chance of the US fighting off an invasion of Taiwan.

Thanks for posting this, I'm glad to see more discussion of the issue and you've laid it out very nicely.

In the interest of thinking seriously about this potential deadly conflict, could you explain why you lean toward abandoning Taiwanese independence if war appears likely? Aside from principle based stances about protecting potential allies and the right of countries to continue governing themselves, I think my main worry is that giving in to bullying seems like it would incentivize future bullying. If the US and other nations declare that they no longer... (read more)

Your comment is 3 months old, but somehow I missed it back when I was posted and am just now seeing it, so I just wanted to say these are all good points, particularly about cooperation on other issues like your climate example!

Fantastic! Thank you!

Makes sense, thanks!

It's possible I missed it but I didn't see anything stating whether multiple submissions from one author are allowed, I assume they are though?

Very cool, thank you!

Is there a way to sort answers by newest? I'm not seeing that option. It would be useful for finding new answers I haven't seen yet.

I'm not sure how your first point relates to what I was saying in this post; but, I'll take a guess.

Sorry, what I said wasn't very clear. Attempting to rephrase, I was thinking more along the lines of what the possible future for AI might look like if there were no EA interventions in the AI space. I haven't seen much discussion of the possible downsides there (for example slowing down AI research by prioritizing alignment resulting in delays in AI advancement and delays in good things brought about by AI advancement). But this was a less-than-half-bake... (read more)

Did your outcomes 2 and 3 get mixed up at some point? I feel like the evaluations don't align with the initial descriptions of those, but maybe I'm misunderstanding.

Thanks for writing this though, this is something I've been thinking a little about as I try to understand longtermism better. It makes sense to be risk-averse with existential risk, but at the same I have a hard time understanding some of the more extreme takes. My wild guess would be that AI has a significantly higher chance of improving the well-being of humanity than it does causing extinct... (read more)

It's a common misconception that those who want to mitigate AI risk think there's a high chance AI wipes out humanity this century. But opinions vary and proponents of mitigating AI risk may still think the likelihood is low. Crowd forecasts have placed the probability of a catastrophe caused by AI as around 5% this century, and extinction caused by AI as around 2.5% this century. But even these low probabilities are worth trying to reduce when what's at stake is millions or billions of lives. How willing would you be to take a pill at random from a pile o... (read more)

That's a good point, I agree. None of my suggestions really fit very well, it's hard to think of a descriptive name that could be easily used conversationally.

It still seems like prefixing with "not" still runs into defining based on disagreement, where I would guess people who lean that way would rather be named for what they're prioritizing as opposed to what they aren't. I came up with a few (probably bad) ideas along that vein:

• Immediatists (apparently not a made up word according to Merriam-Webster)
• Contemporary altruists
• Effective immediately

I'm relatively new so take my opinion with a big grain of salt. Maybe "not longtermist" is fine with most.

There are good points and helpful, thanks! I agree I wasn't clear about viewing the scenarios exclusively in the initial comment, I think I made that a little clearer in the follow up.

when I read 80% to reach saturation at 40% predictive power I read this as "capping out at around 40%" which would only leave a maximum of 20% for scenarios with much greater than 40%?

Ah I think I see how that's confusing. My use of the term saturation probably confuses things too much. My understanding is saturation is the likely maximum that could be explained with curr... (read more)

No problem!

Also if you're interested in elaborating about why my scenarios were unintuitive I'd appreciate the feedback, but if not no worries!

This was a cool contest, thanks for running it! In my view there's a lot of value in doing this. Doing a deep dive into polygenic selection for IQ was something I had wanted to do for quite a while and your contest motivated me to finally sit down and actually do it and to write it up in a way that would be potentially useful to others.

I think your initial criteria of how much a writeup changed your minds may have played a role in fewer than expected entries as well. Your forecasts on the set of questions seemed very reasonable and my own forecasts were pr... (read more)

That's really interesting, thanks! I wonder why India is so supportive of it in comparison to other countries.

Even if the ~300 new DF-41 silos discovered last year are each armed with only 3 warheads (the missile can carry ~10 max), and no other silos are built/discovered, that's still 900 warheads on top of the ~400 already in service.

I'm not well-versed in this area but reading through the Chinese nuclear notebook from November 2021 they seem kind of skeptical of claims like this and point out that China could also be intending the silos to be a "shell game". Quoting from the notebook:

And in November 2021, the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress projects t

Yeah definitely on the same page then! I agree with what you said there with the possible exception or caveat that I'm skeptical on improvements to the Taiwan issue and that if you find or know of any persuasive abyss-staring arguments on this topic (or write them yourself) I'd appreciate it if you share them with me because I'd be happy to be wrong in my skepticism and would like to learn more about any promising options.

To be clear I'm not arguing that people shouldn't think about it or try to solve it. I'm definitely in favor of more discussion on that topic and I'd love to read some high effort analysis from an EA perspective.

If I'm understanding correctly the main point you're making is that I probably shouldn't have said this:

There is little room for improvement here...

Which in that case that's a fair critique. I'm not well-informed enough to know the options here and their advantages and risks in great detail, so my perception that there's not much room for impro... (read more)

This is a good point, I completely agree that the trade war is of small importance relative to things like relations with Taiwan. My reason for focusing on the trade war though is because trade deescalation would have very few downsides and would probably be a substantial positive all on its own before even considering the potential positive effects it could have on relations with China and possibly nuclear risk.

To me the same can't be said for the Taiwan issue. The optimal policy here is far from clear to me. Strategic ambiguity is our intentional policy,... (read more)

That's a good question, I've thought about this some before and while it's kind of messy I think the general gist of my thoughts is something like this (framed from a US perspective but I think it generalizes to most countries):

Tariffs should be avoided or minimized wherever possible due to them likely costing US citizens much more than they benefit them. However tariffs and sanctions can be important tools when a country does something very offensive, particularly when punitive measures are applied in cooperation with allies. Tariffs and sanctions shoul

That makes sense, I agree it's better to have more direct sources.

I don't know this area at all, but here is data from one review paper I found.

I didn't have access to your link but I found another version of it here.

To be honest I'm not familiar with the direct evidence either so I'm mostly relying on secondhand impressions and general descriptions of tariff burdens falling on consumers. I searched around briefly just now and found this paper (also cited in the paper you linked as Amiti et al. (2020b)) which reports:

Using another year of data including significant escalations in the trade war, we find that U.S. tariffs