GiveWell.org interviews SIAI

Paul Crowley

Holden Karnofsky of GiveWell.org interviewed Jasen Murray of SIAI and published his notes (Edit: PDF, thanks lukeprog!), with updates from later conversations. Lots of stuff to take an interest in there - thanks to jsalvatier for drawing our attention to it. One new bit of information stands out in particular:

Michael Vassar is working on an idea he calls the "Persistent Problems Group" or PPG. The idea is to assemble a blue-ribbon panel of recognizable experts to make sense of the academic literature on very applicable, popular, but poorly understood topics such as diet/nutrition. This would have obvious benefits for helping people understand what the literature has and hasn't established on important topics; it would also be a demonstration that there is such a thing as "skill at making sense of the world."

Michael Vassar is working on an idea he calls the "Persistent Problems Group" or PPG. The idea is to assemble a blue-ribbon panel of recognizable experts to make sense of the academic literature on very applicable, popular, but poorly understood topics such as diet/nutrition. This would have obvious benefits for helping people understand what the literature has and hasn't established on important topics; it would also be a demonstration that there is such a thing as "skill at making sense of the world."

The problem, though, is that what the rationalists will probably conclude is "there's no solid evidence, and it seems likely that any advice works well for a subset of the population and hurts other subsets of the population. You should quantify yourself and experiment."

Which is advice that people are going to have a hard time taking. Giving up specialization of labor is rather hard and rarely worth it.

Now, they might find a few gems- like "you should figure out diaphragmatic breathing"- but it'll be hard to separate those from fads or overbroad advice ("this diet agrees with my evolutionary views, thus I suspect it's good for everyone").

I think even this would be pretty useful; it basically means 'we don't know anything of use; average person should ignore this field for at least 10 years'.

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GiveWell.org interviews SIAI

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GiveWell.org interviews SIAI

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