AppliedDivinityStudies

From Anneal's post last year

If your org is shaped like a Y-combinator company, you can spend dozens of hours absorbing high-quality, expert-crafted content.... How likely is org building success, in this premier reference class
5%.
An AI safety lab is not the same as a Y-combinator company.
It is. WAY. FUCKING. HARDER.

The implication is that you should expect AI safety labs for have an even higher failure rate. Is that fair?

Consider:

In the stat Anneal links, "success" means becoming a "unicorn", i.e. achieving a billion dollar valuation.
The standard YC deal is that they take 7% of your company for $125k.
7% of a billion dollar company is $70m.^[1]

Now imagine that the success rate for YC was... (read 409 more words →)

Replying toWhy so little AI risk on rationalist-adjacent blogs?

Why so little AI risk on rationalist-adjacent blogs?

Hi, I write AppliedDivinityStudies.com which you link to. A couple quick clarifications:
- The blog is not written by Alexey Guzey.
- In the piece you link I'm just taking Toby Ord's estimates at face value to use them as a parameter, I haven't given this a ton of thought.

But basically I do think AI Risk is important. I don't write about it because I don't have anything particularly smart to say. As you note, it's a complex topic, and I don't really feel like there's any value in me contributing unless I were to really invest in learning much more.

Once every couple years or so, I feel a bad about this and try... (read more)

Replying to(briefly) RaDVaC and SMTM, two things we should be doing

(briefly) RaDVaC and SMTM, two things we should be doing

Guyenet, who's palatability theory you seem to prefer, shares the same interpretation as SMTM. His chart from The Hungry Brain:

And his commentary:

In 1960, one out of seven US adults had obesity. By 2010, that number had increased to one out of three (see figure 2). The prevalence of extreme obesity increased even more remarkably over that time period, from one out of 111 to one out of 17. Ominously, the prevalence of obesity in children also increased nearly fivefold. Most of these changes occurred after 1978 and happened with dizzying speed. [emaphasis mine]

Replying to(briefly) RaDVaC and SMTM, two things we should be doing

(briefly) RaDVaC and SMTM, two things we should be doing

Wait what? This isn't even a chart of the same thing.

It's a chart of data from 1880 to ~1980, whereas SMTM as looking specifically as the change in 1980
It's a charge of BMI, whereas the SMTM chart is looking at growth in extreme outcomes. Say you have a normal distribution with mean 24 and SD 2. Only 0.13% of the population will have BMI over 30. But as the mean BMI slowly increases, you see rapid growth in extreme outcomes. At mean BMI of 26, you're up to 2% over 30, at mean BMI 28 you're up to 16%. So the fact that BMI growth is smooth doesn't imply that obesity growth is smooth too.

Replying toYou Can Get Fluvoxamine

It was 100mg 2x daily for 10 days.

On one hand: that's higher than a typical dose for depression. On the other hand, I'm tempted to take the maximum safe amount. I think up to 300mg / day is sometimes prescribed for depression, but I really don't know how the risk of various side effects increases with dosage.

So one option if you get Covid is to start at 50mg, see if you have any side effects, see how they compare to the severity of your Covid symptoms, and react accordingly. But in practice if I got Covid and had symptoms I would probably just do the 100mg 2x.

Replying toYou Can Get Fluvoxamine

Nice, that's cool to see.

FWIW I would personally totally take paxlovid over fluvoxamine if I could, but it seems to be in very short supply.

Replying toYou Can Get Fluvoxamine

I have no idea. I guess it falls under "Unauthorized Practice of Medicine".

Replying toYou Can Get Fluvoxamine

Sorry yes, you should take it as evidence, just not definitive evidence.

Replying toYou Can Get Fluvoxamine

Might be hard on your liver?

I'm sure you've seen it before, but just in case anyone hasn't: https://www.gwern.net/Modafinil

[TLDR: I paid $95 for a 10 minute video consultation with a doctor, told them I was depressed and wanted fluvoxamine, and got my prescription immediately.]

I'm not a doctor, and this isn't medical advice. If you want information on the status of fluvoxamine as a Covid treatment, you can see the evidence base in the appendix, but interpreting those results isn't my business.

I'm just here to tell you that if you want fluvoxamine, you can get it.

Years ago, some of my friends were into downloading apps that would get you a 10 minute consultation with a doctor in order to quickly acquire a prescription for medical marajuana. Today, similar apps exist for... (read 602 more words →)

Replying to(briefly) RaDVaC and SMTM, two things we should be doing

(briefly) RaDVaC and SMTM, two things we should be doing

R.e. #2

They provide literally no evidence for the proposition that the Hadza eat as much sugar as Americans do, their citations certainly do not demonstrate this.

The cited paper has a chart showing that Hadza get 14% of their calories from honey. A quick google search claims honey has 17g sugar per 64 calorie serving. So assuming 2000 calories/day, that's 280 calories of honey, which contains 74g sugar.

According to some google results, Americans consume around 70 (highest I saw was 77) grams of total sugar per day.

So it does seem to be similar. SMTM writes that this is "Combined with all the sugar they get from eating fruit". The same paper says 19% of their calories are from berries and another 18% from baobab fruit.

So it seems entirely plausible that SMTM is correct here.

Ranked Choice Voting is Arbitrarily Bad

Responses and Testimonies on EA Growth

Cross posting from https://applieddivinitystudies.com/2020/09/02/ranked-bad/

Recently, there's been headway in adopting Ranked-Choice Voting, used by several states in the 2020 US Democratic presidential primaries and to be adopted by New York City in 2021.

For all its virtues, Ranked Choice Voting contains a number of risks, largely due to tactical voting and democratic illegitimacy.

First, a quick primer on existing systems.

The one we're used to is called Plurality Voting, and is by far the simplest: Each voter casts a vote for one candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins.

Though clear and intuitive, there are several problems best illustrated by example:

Tactical Voting for "Realistic Candidates" Say public polls report:

45% of voters prefer Alice
45% of voters prefer

... (read 961 more words →)

Why Hasn't Effective Altruism Grown Since 2015?

Follow up to Monday's post Why Hasn't Effective Altruism Grown Since 2015?. See discussions on r/scc, LessWrong and EA Forum.

I'm honored to have received responses from Scott Alexander, Katja Grace (AI Impacts), Peter Hurford (Rethink Priorities), and Rob Bensinger (MIRI), among many other insightful replies.

This is a long post, so I'm going to put the summary first:

EA has shifted from "earning to give" to "talent-focus", leading to less of as mass movement.
By some metrics, EA is continuing to grow. Most notably, non-Open Phil donations to Give Well causes are way up the last few years.
Good Ventures is intentionally holding off increased giving while Give Well and Open Philanthropy build capacity.

In short: EA... (read 4378 more words →)

Contra StatNews: How Long to Herd Immunity?

Edit: There's now a follow up post here. LW Discussion. EA Forum and r/ssc.

Here's a chart of GiveWell's annual money moved. It rose dramatically from 2014 to 2015, then more or less plateaued:

Open Philanthropy doesn't provide an equivalent chart, but they do have a grants database, so I was able to compile the data myself. It peaks in 2017, then falls a bit and plateaus:

(Note that the GiveWell and Open Philanthropy didn't formally split until 2017. GiveWell records $70.4m from Open Philanthropy in 2015, which isn't included in Open Philanthropy's own records. I've emailed them for clarification, but in the meantime, the overall story in the same: A rapid rise followed... (read 2515 more words →)