All of tcheasdfjkl's Comments + Replies

or like, if you're close  with someone who did a significant bad thing and is now facing significant consequences for it, it can make sense to be loyal in the sense of - trying to help them make it through this time, trying to not make things worse for them. but not in the sense of denying or defending their wrongdoing.

Yeah I wouldn't upvote every post that makes an unpopular argument. But I upvote posts that I want to encourage on the margin, which includes posts that are wrong but better to make than not to.

I guess he could have also not been reading carefully and missed that somehow?

I think we should definitely not be loyal to people who commit massive fraud, or praise ambitious destruction! I know "stand fully by my people no matter how right or wrong they are" is a common moral stance but I think it's enormously wrong and destructive. It's an important virtue to support things that are good and not things that are bad, even if we're very attached to them. (Also, like, I think SBF betrayed "us" first.)

(Sorry this is more of a skeleton of an argument than an actual argument, I keep meaning to write out more of my thinking here and not finding time)

2
tcheasdfjkl
1y
or like, if you're close  with someone who did a significant bad thing and is now facing significant consequences for it, it can make sense to be loyal in the sense of - trying to help them make it through this time, trying to not make things worse for them. but not in the sense of denying or defending their wrongdoing.

But Kelsey said in her email that she was going to write about their conversation, and he didn't object. What do you think his epistemic state was, if he knew she was writing about the conversation but objected to the actual damning things he said being included? It seems like for those things to both be true, it would have to be the case that he expected her to write a piece that somehow left out the most damning things, i.e. to write a weirdly positively distorted piece.

5
tcheasdfjkl
1y
I guess he could have also not been reading carefully and missed that somehow?

I really love the upvote:agreement ratio on this comment. There is some disagreement as to whether this is a good comment, but everybody agrees that what the fuck.

Strongly disagree with most of this but upvoting because I am actively in favor of people laying out their reasoning for unpopular positions so that people can engage with the reasoning directly, rather than only operating only on the level of "this is wrong and you should feel bad".

I disagree with this policy, for what it's worth. I think you should upvote high quality posts, where the author uses good reasoning in favour of a conclusion you disagreed with or hadn't considered, which you think deserve more attention - not just every post that makes an unpopular argument!

To be fair sometimes people make accusations that are incorrect? Your decision procedure does need to allow for the possibility of not taking a given accusation seriously. I don't know who knew what and how reasonable a conclusion this was for any given person given their state of knowledge, in this case, but also people do get this wrong sometimes, this doesn't seem implausible to me.

2
Devon Fritz
1y
My decision procedure does allow for that and I have lots of uncertainties, but it feels that given many insiders claim to have warned people in positions of power about this and Sam got actively promoted anyway. If multiple people with intimate knowledge of someone came to you and told you that they thought person X was of bad character you wouldn't have to believe them hook line and sinker to be judicious about promoting that person.    Maybe this is the most plausible of the 3 and I shouldn't have called it super implausible, but it doesn't seem very plausible for me, especially from people in a movement that takes risks more seriously than any other that I know.

That's very surprising!!

Do you know if anybody attempted to propagate this information to any of the EAs who were promoting SBF publicly? (If so, do you know if they succeeded in conveying that information to them?)

And just to check, did any of the people who warn you privately promote SBF/FTX publicly?

I ask because it seems weird for a lot of EAs to be passing around warnings about SBF being untrustworthy while a lot of (other?) EAs are promoting him publicly; I very much hope these sets were disjoint, but also it's weird for them to be so disjoint, I would have expected better information flow.

Yep, I was and continue to be confused about this. I did tell a bunch of people that I think promoting SBF publicly was bad, and e.g. sent a number of messages when some news article that people were promoting (or maybe 80k interview?)  was saying that "Sam sleeps on a bean bag" and "Sam drives a Corolla" when I was quite confident that they knew that Sam was living in one of the most expensive and lavish properties in the Bahamas and was definitely not living a very frugal livestyle. This was just at the same time as the Carrick stuff was happening, ... (read more)

I think there's at least some difference between [money you've already been paid for work you've already done] and [money you've been granted for future work that you have not yet done / money you haven't yet spent on hiring other people / etc.]; I very clearly agree with you in the first case and think it's at least murkier in the second case.

Huge thanks for spelling out the specific allegations about SBF's behavior in early Alameda; for the past couple days I'd been seeing a lot of "there was known sketchy stuff at Alameda in 2017-18" and it was kind of frustrating how hard it was to get any information about what is actually alleged to have happened, so I really appreciate this clear point-by-point summary.

2
Yitz
1y
Same here, this is really helping me understand the (at least perceived) narrative flow of events

How far in advance would you expect US officials to warn the public of the possibility of nukes? (i.e. how much time would we have between such a warning and needing to have left already?)

4
Kelsey Piper
1y
I don't know, but I think likely days not weeks. Tactical nuke use will be a good test ground for this - do we get advance warning from US officials about that? How much advance warning?

I don't know about elsewhere, but at least in the Bay the notion that people might have spare rooms they've just forgotten to consider renting out is downright funny.

4
Greg_Colbourn
3y
I realise that. But I wouldn't be surprised if the median household in the developed world had at least one spare room (this was one of the reasons why the "bedroom tax" was so unpopular in the UK).
3
Milan_Griffes
3y
There's actually a lot of underutilized real estate in the Bay Area, especially in East Bay, Marin, South Bay, and the Peninsula.  Much of it is locked up in big old houses that haven't turned over in a long time though.

There are not currently a bunch of openings (probably because eligibility just expanded).

"Mikhail Yagudin ($28,000): Giving copies of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to the winners of EGMO 2019 and IMO 2020"

Why does this cost so much?

7
Denkenberger
5y
And why so much focus on math rather than science/engineering?

It's a pretty large number of books, from the application:

Giving HPMoRs out would allow EA or Rationalist communities to establish initial contact with about 650 gifted students (~200 for EGMO and ~450 for IMO)

It seems like the main issue here is a disconnect between how 80k is generally described, including in its own guide ("career advice for EAs"/"how to use your career to increase your impact"), and 80k's own internal vision of what it is ("how to solve important problems by directing talented people at them"). It seems that the former is a misrepresentation of the latter and people including 80k should stop misrepresenting it.

5
DavidNash
5y
I think even the slightly out of date advice is still pretty good for getting people to think about the right ways to approach finding an impactful job. There isn't an alternative that I point people towards even if the latest content and coaching is more targeted than the general advice. For the majority of their audience I think this is okay, but for people who might set up similar career coaching and content it might crowd them out, although this has already been mentioned in other comments.

Yes! I have independently discovered this exact same thing for myself, though my terminology is almost the opposite of yours - I think I had always thought of "rest days" as days mostly spent in front of the TV or online (corresponding to your Recovery Days), whereas what I now realize I need to do regularly is "doing whatever I want" days, which I also sometimes call "desire days" - I end up doing a lot of things I don't really think of as rest but which are much more restorative than just resting.

(If I'm really tir... (read more)