All of Rían O'M 's Comments + Replies
Vote power should scale with karma
On group think: I think this worry can mostly be ignored if the elite-karma accounts have sufficiently diverse views. That being the case would mean that (a) diverse views aren't obviously being punished and (b) to voters with the most individual leverage are less likely to all vote in the same direction. If they top karma accounts were all aligned in how they vote or were even colluding to suppress comments / posts, then the downsides of group-think would be more pronounced.
I guess It feels like this should be a tes...
And if he is still giving money to official EA causes, it should be loudly and swiftly returned.
In cases where a person has donated money they secured through crime, it seems right to reject it, but rejecting someone's money because one doesn't like their politics seems like a bad idea.
Suppose a hypothetical medicine-distribution charity that had been funded by Musk announced they would forgo accepting his future donations and would distribute fewer pills as a result. What exactly would this achieve? Maybe they would succeed in pleasing people who sh...
People frequently do things like taking Rethink's moral weights project (which kinda skips over a lot of hard philosophical problems about measurement and what we can learn from animal behavior, and goes all-in on a simple perspective of total hedonic utilitarianism which I think is useful but not ultimately correct), and just treat the numbers as if they are unvarnished truth
Can you point to specific cases of that happening? I haven't seen this happen before. My sense is that most people who quote Rethinks moral weights project are familiar with the limit...
Rethink's weights unhedged in the wild: the most recent time I remember seeing this was when somebody pointed me towards this website: https://foodimpacts.org/, which uses Rethink's numbers to set the moral importance of different animals. They only link to where they got the weights in a tiny footnote on a secondary page about methods, and they don't mention any other ways that people try to calculate reference weights, or anything about what it means to "assume hedonism" or etc. Instead, we're told these weights are authoritative and scientific because...
This makes me think that countries who as of yet don't have an entrenched factory farming lobby/industry would benefit advocacy groups similar to Shrimp Welfare Project (work in the reverent countries with stakeholders to improve the wellbeing of farmed animals).
I began wondering if any org was approaching this similar to SWP. There seem to be two EA groups working on this:
...It would have made sense for there to be a bit more discussion about ethical side-constraints, but including transparency in the list of core principles would honestly be just weird because transparency isn't distinctly EA. Beyond that, the importance of transparency is significantly complicated by the concept of infohazards in areas like biohazards or AI safety. I really don't see it as CEA's role to take a side in these debates. I think it makes sense for CEA to embrace transparency as a key organisational value, but it's not a core principle of EA in ge
is filled with bizarre factual errors, one of which was so egregious that it merited a connection.
Small nitpick; this is a typo or 'connection' is something I'm not familiar with in this context.
I am going to engage less with EA forum/LW as a result of this and a few similar interactions, and I am especially going to be more hesitant to be critical of EA/LW sacred cows.
This makes me sad as I enjoy reading your comments and find them insightful. That said, I understand and support your reasoning. I feel as though some amount of "mistake mindset" has disappeared a little in the two years I've been reading the forum.
Thanks Rían, I appreciate it. And to be fair, this is from my perspective as much a me thing as it is an Oli thing. Like, I don't think the global optimal solution is an EA forum that's a cuddly little safe space for me. But we all have to make the tradeoffs that make most sense for us individually, and this kind of thing is costly for me.
Thanks for sharing your post!
Pharmaceutical companies won't go and release hundreds of dud or dangerous drugs just because they can. That would ruin their brand and shut down their business.
I briefly skimmed through the wikipedia list of withdrawn drugs. I looked at those withdrawn in the US or worldwide since 2007 (only eleven).
As far as I could tell (and I easily could have missed something) none of the associated pharma companies seem to have been financially ruined. The only ones who no longer existed (Wyeth and Celltech) were bought out by...
I haven't read too much into this and am probably missing something.
Why do you think FTXFF was receiving grants via north dimension? The brief googling I did only mentioned north dimension in the context of FTX customers sending funds to FTX (specifically this SEC complaint). I could easily have missed something.
Thank you for writing this up!! I found it insightful and helpful.
It’s extremely hard to correlate low energy to the correct causes and ruling out sleep is one of the most effective things you can do.
As someone who's had at times a less than optimal sleep cycle, I strongly agree with this. Removing sleep as a potential cause can make it much easier to spot why one is consistently tired / drained.
Is this not already the case? I.e. don't the major EAGs already focus on specific cause areas?