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Perhaps I should point out one particular way in which I could be badly wrong: presumably aid tends to go to the poorest African countries, whose GDP may be way below the average, so 1% of GDP might turn out to be a substantial amount for the countries it actually goes to. Perhaps Moyo's book has the relevant numbers?
Eliezer, it's clear that Africa is in trouble. How compelling an argument does Moyo's book offer for believing that Africa is in trouble because it needs less aid, rather than because it needs more?
In this particular context it seems a bit strange to describe Moyo as an African economist. She lives in London and so far as I can tell has lived in the West for most of her adult life. In particular, the two most obvious reasons one might have for trusting an African economist more on this issue -- that her self-interest is more closely aligned with what's best for Africa than with what's best for the West, and that... (read more)
I'm not sure whether "it" in Rasmus's second paragraph is referring specifically to the fact that you can submit old predictions, or to the idea of the site as a whole; but the possibility -- nay, the certainty -- of considerable selection bias makes this (to me) not at all like a database of all pundit predictions, but more another form of entertainment.
Don't misunderstand me; I think it's an excellent form of entertainment, and entertainment with an important serious side. But even if someone is represented by a dozen predictions on Wrong Tomorrow, all of them (correctly) marked WRONG, that could just mean that it's only the wackiest 1% of their predictions... (read more)
vroman, see the post on Less Wrong about least-convenient possible worlds. And the analogue in Doug's scenario of the existence of (Pascal's) God isn't the reality of the lottery he proposes -- he's just asking you to accept that for the sake of argument -- but your winning the lottery.
Carl, it clearly isn't based only on that since Eliezer says "You see it all the time in discussion of cryonics".
Eliezer, it seems to me that you may be being unfair to those who respond "Isn't that a form of Pascal's wager?". In an exchange of the form
Cryonics Advocate: "The payoff could be a thousand extra years of life or more!"
Cryonics Skeptic: "Isn't that a form of Pascal's wager?"
I observe that CA has made handwavy claims about the size of the payoff, hasn't said anything about how the utility of a long life depends on its length (there could well be diminishing returns), and hasn't offered anything at all like a probability calculation, and has entirely neglected the downsides (I think Yvain makes a decent case that they aren't obviously dominated by... (read more)
(Second attempt at posting this. My first attempt vanished into the void. Apologies if this ends up being a near-duplicate.)
Patrick (orthonormal), I'm pretty sure "Earth" is right. If you're in the Huygens system already, you wouldn't talk about "the Huygens starline". And the key point of what they're going to do is to keep the Superhappies from reaching Earth; cutting off the Earth/Huygens starline irrevocably is what really matters, and it's just too bad that they can't do it without destroying Huygens. (Well, maybe keeping the Superhappies from finding out any more about the human race is important too.)
Patrick (orthonormal), I'm fairly sure that "Earth" is correct. They haven't admitted that what they're going to do is blow up Huygens (though of course the President guesses), and the essential thing about what they're doing is that it stops the aliens getting to Earth (and therefore to the rest of humanity). And when talking to someone in the Huygens system, talk of "the Huygens starline" wouldn't make much sense; we know that there are at least two starlines with endpoints at Huygens.
Eliezer, did you really mean to have the "multiplication factor" go from 1.5 to 1.2 rather than to something bigger than 1.5?
Beerholm --> Beerbohm, surely? (On general principles; I am not familiar with the particular bit of verse Eliezer quoted.)
kebko, (1) doubtless there's something terribly dysfunctional going on; the question is whether it's better treated by giving more aid or by giving less. (2) If the continent's GDP might have been larger than it is, then the argument I was making applies more, not less. (Namely: the amount of foreign aid seems very small in comparison with the total size of the economy, which suggests that the amount of influence it can have had for good or ill probably isn't all that enormous.)
Carl, I like the idea of inventing things and making them free, but it might be unattractive to the people who'd need to do (or at least fund) it... (read more)