All of ZachWeems's Comments + Replies

Un-endorsed for two reasons. 

• Manifold invited people based on having advocated for prediction markets, which is a much stricter criterion than being a generic public speaker that feels positively about your organization. With a smaller pool of speakers, it is not trivially cheap to apply filters, so it is not as clear cut as I claimed. (I could have found out this detail before writing, and I feel embarrassed that I didn't.)
• Despite having an EA in a leadership role and ample EA-adjacent folks that associate with it, Manifold doesn't consider itself EA

Imagine a hundred well-intentioned people look into whether there are dragons. They look in different places, make different errors, and there are a lot of things that could be confused for dragons or things dragons could be confused for, so this is a noisy process. Unless the evidence is overwhelming in one direction or another, some will come to believe that there are dragons, while others will believe that there are not.

While humanity is not perfect at uncovering the truth in confusing situations, our approach that best approaches the truth is for peopl

Agreed.

I think I wasn't entirely clear; the recommendation was that if my claim sounded rational people should update their probability, not that people should change their asymmetric question policy. Edited a bit to make it more clear.

For simplicity I'll put aside some disagreements about which spaces are rationalist, and assume we'd agree on what lines we'd like to draw.

I think you're assuming a higher level of control among rationalists than what actually exists. "Must" requires "can", and I don't think we have much of that.

If he wanted to, Scott could take a harsher moderation policy on his substack. I'd like it if he did. Frankly, some of the commenters are mindkilled morons, and my impression is there were less of those in the SSC days. But at the end of the day it's his decision, ... (read more)

oThis isn't directly responsive to your comment but- I've gone to that particular edge of the map and poked around a bit. I think people who avoid looking into the question for the above reason typically sound like they expect that there plausibly be dragons. This is a PSA that I saw no dragons, so the reader should consider the dragons less plausible.

There certainly are differences in individual intelligence due to genetics. And at the species level, genes are what cause humans to be smarter than, say, turtles. It's also true that there's no law of realit... (read more)

Clarifying for forum archeologists: "traditionalist" in Catholicism refers to people who consider the theological claims and organizational changes in Vatican II to be illegitimate, or at minimum taken too far. Catholics who consider the Church to have divinely guided authority over religious and moral truths will sometimes call themselves "orthodox" (lowercase) Catholics, to distinguish themselves from those who don't accept this & from traditionalists who accept everything up to Vatican II.

So, ozymandias intended to indicate "Davis accepts the Vatican's teaching on sin, hell, sexual mores, etc". Davis objected to an adjective that implied he rejects Vatican II.

I'm inclined to write defenses of views in the latter paragraph:

• My read (I admit I skimmed) is that Scott doesn't opine because he is uncertain whether there is a large scale reproduction-influencing program that would be a good idea in a world without GE on the horizon, not that he has a hidden opinion about reproduction programs we ought to be doing despite the possibility of GE.
• I don't think the mere presence of a "dysgenic" discussion in a Bostrom paper merits criticism. Part of his self-assigned career path is to address all of the X-risks. This inclu

I don't know that "extremist" is a good characterization of FTX & Alameda's actions.

Usually "extremist" implies a willingness to take highly antisocial actions for the sake of an extreme ideology.

It's fair to say that trying to found a billion dollar company with the explicit goal of eventually donating all profits is an extreme action. It's highly unusual and goes much further with specific ideas than most adherents do. But unless one is taking a very harsh stance against capitalism (or against cryptocurrency), it's hard to call this action highly ant... (read more)

The agree-votes have pretty directly proven you correct.

|I meant to link to Gottfredson's statement. Do you think that black people and other racial groups scored equally on IQ tests in 1996? I don't.

My disagreement was with the characterization of Gottfredson's statement as mainstream when this is disputed by mainstream sources. 

It is true that there was a difference in IQ scores, so I suggested a less disputed source saying so.

|People don't object as often  to arguments about race in this way in other contexts. For example, "black people are abused by the police more" doesn't get the response of "wh... (read more)

Separate from my other comment:

|people of the white race, black race, and Asian race

I'm assuming this was completely unintended, but terms like "the X race" have very negative connotations in American English. Especially if X is "white". Better terms are "X people" or "people categorized as X".

"Blacks" also has somewhat negative connotations. "Black people" is better.

(I apologize on behalf of America for our extremely complicated rules about phrasing)

I hard-disagreed for two reasons:

• The mainstream-ness of the linked statement is heavily disputed. A person in 1996 could have reasonably been unaware of this ofc. (You may have intended to link to the 1996 APA report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns instead?)
• Accuracy about genetics and race is unusually important in charged conversations like this, and your 1st paragraph seems to miss an important point: categories like "black", "white" and "Asian" are poor choices of genetic clusters. This is part of why population geneticists will call race a social con

I disagree with the first and last sentences of the last paragraph- while Bostrom's statements were compatible with a belief in genetically-influenced IQ differences,  he did not clearly say so.

That said, it isn't to his credit that he hedged about it in the apology.

Tangent: Out of curiosity, did you/ does your friend typically refer to (belief in meaningful genetically influenced racial IQ differences) as "HBD", as "part of/under HBD", or neither?

My impression was the term was mostly used by genetics nerds, with a small number of racists using the term as a fig leaf, causing the internet to think it was a motte-and-bailey in all uses. If people who mostly cared about the IQ thing used it regularly I suppose I was wrong.

(And to be clear since I'm commenting under my own name, meaningful genetically influenced racial IQ differences aren't plausible. My interest is the old internet drama.)

FAQ number 5) reads oddly.

|5) Was nepotism involved? In particular, would FLI's president's brother have profited in any way had the grant been awarded?

|No. He published some articles in the newspaper, but the understanding from the very beginning was that this was pro-bono, and he was never paid and never planned to get paid by the newspaper of the foundation. The grant proposal requested no funds for him. He is a journalist with many years of experience working for Swedish public radio and television, and runs his own free and non-commercial podcast. The... (read more)

Consider that perhaps the reason most of us on the forum aren't agreeing with you- and the reason Bostrom himself repudiated his words- isn't the taboo around the belief, but rather that most of us think the evidence is unconvincing at best. 

But most of us are not willing to have the object-level debate here for reasons such as politics being mindkiller, not wanting this to become a forum for debating taboo positions, and yes, internal and public perception of the community.

(I don't have survey data or anything, but I'd bet this is the case.)

If so, to the extent the majority of EA's tend to be right about things, you should update in that direction in lieu of having the thoughtful critiques of your position.

Agreed. 

My model is, he has a number of frustrations with EA. That on its own isn't a big deal. There are plenty of valid, invalid, and arguable gripes with various aspects of EA. 

But he also has a major bucket error where the concept of "far-right" is applied to a much bigger Category of bad stuff. Since some aspects of EA & longtermism seem to be X to him, and X goes in the Category, and stuff in the Category is far-right, EA must have far-right aspects. To inform people of the problem, he writes articles claiming they're far-right. 

If... (read more)

Commenting from five months into the future, when this is topically relevant:

I disagree. I read Torres' arguments as not merely flawed, but as attempts to link longtermism to the far right in US culture wars. In such environments people are inclined to be uncharitable, and to spread the word to others who will also be uncharitable. With enough bad press it's possible to get a Common Knowledge effect, where even people who are inclined to be openminded are worried about being seen doing so. That could be bad for recruiting, funding, cooperative endeavors, &... (read more)

I have read and reread this comment and am honestly not sure whether this was a reply to my answer or to something else.

On point 1, I think the past week is a fair indication that the coronavirus is a big problem, and we can let this point pass.

On point 2, as of my answer, there seemed to be no academic talk of human challenge trials to shorten vaccine timelines, regardless of how many were working on vaccines. The problem I see is that if a human challenge trial would shorten timelines, authorities and researchers might still hesitate to run one due to p... (read more)

Meta:

It might be worthwhile to have some sort of flag or content warning for potentially controversial posts like this.

On the other hand, this could be misused by people who dislike the EA movement, who could use it as a search parameter to find and "signal-boost" content that looks bad when taken out of context.

|...having a Big Event with people On Stage is just a giant opportunity for a bunch of people new to the problem to spout out whatever errors they thought up in the first five seconds of thinking, neither aware of past work nor expecting to engage with detailed criticism...

I had to go back and double-check that this comment was written before Asilomar 2017. It describes some of the talks very well.

I would also like to be added to the crazy EA's investing group. Could you send an invite to me on here?

The 'Stache is great! He's actually how I heard about Effective Altruism.

Right, I'm accounting for my own selfish desires here. An optimally moral me-like person would only save enough to maximize his career potential.

| It just seems rather implausible, to me, that retirement money is anywhere close to being a cost-effective intervention, relative to other likely EA options.

I don't think that "Give 70-year-old Zach a passive income stream" is an effective cause area. It is a selfish maneuver. But the majority of EAs seem to form some sort of boundary, where they only feel obligated to donate up to a certain point (whether that is due to partially selfish "utility functions" or a calculated move to prevent burnout). I've considered choosing some arbit... (read more)

Question 2: Suppose tomorrow MIRI creates a friendly AGI that can learn a value system, make it consistent with minimal alteration, and extrapolate it in an agreeable way. Whose values would it be taught?

I've heard the idea of averaging all humans' values together and working from there. Given that ISIS is human and that many other humans believe that the existence of extreme physical and emotional suffering is good, I find that idea pretty repellent. Are there alternatives that have been considered?

It seems like people in academia tend to avoid mentioning MIRI. Has this changed in magnitude during the past few years, and do you expect it to change any more? Do you think there is a significant number of public intellectuals who believe in MIRI's cause in private while avoiding mention of it in public?