All of emanuele ascani's Comments + Replies
I think this would be on-topic for the EA Forum too!
The audio is very appreciated, I ended up listening instead of reading.
Quote from Second Comment: "In his first TED talk in 2005 Aubrey's message was that we have 90% chance for robust mouse rejuvenation in 10 years if $100 million per year would be invested philanthropically. We're now in 2021, 16 years from his talk, funding overall is much greater than $100 million per year, although it's not just philanthropic.
"Although it's not just philanthropic".
You can't say that Aubrey de Grey's prediction is wrong by invalidating a piece of the antecedent in the implication. Also: he meant $100M to SENS. Currently, SENS ...
I'm disappointed by the downvotes and by the answers. I don't see any problem with this question, and the concept it points at is useful to think about.
This is utterly deranged and I'm not sure if it was meant as a joke or not, but fuck I enjoyed it, and holy shit that WebMD link is absolutely crazy. Thanks for posting.
In all seriousness: I suspect we should explore such crazy ideas at least intellectually, just because we never know where the mind could turn after having considered them.
pick every company in proportion to their market cap
I didn't know this, now it makes much more sense, thank you.
Yes, right, so to continue this line of thought: since more diversified means less risk, Gwern would want to buy VTSAX if he needs to spend that money in a relatively short time horizon. If this isn't the reason, though, from what I gathered from a personal finance book I read years ago, funds tracking S&P500 always outperformed funds tracking the entire U.S. equity market over long periods (is this actually true?). So I was curious about why Gwern made such a choice in case the reason I hypothesized (he is investing money he potentially needs shorter-term) was wrong and there are actually good reasons to buy funds tracking the total US equity market even when saving long term.
Why not S&P500?
Once you have dealt with signaling, one other huge problem remains. I have met just one person IRL who actually invests (my brother). Everyone else isn't aware safe investment options exist and they just put everything in the bank account.
Also, in my experience, middle-aged and older people tend to downplay their wealth and not brag about it (why? Not entirely sure). Younger people instead seem more braggy... but most young people aren't very wealthy. This is just my experience though. I wonder if it is actually common.
Another angle to view this is "coming up with ideas is compulsory if you want to optimize literally everything". Bonus: when you practice holding off proposing solutions, ideas are usually better.
True. Thanks for the good tip. I might actually implement it now that the weather and temperature are nicer.
Italy. House of 5 people. A city with around 1k cases per day for a few months. One person goes to school, sees friends, invites friends into the house. Another travels abroad or inside the country for a few days every 10 days or so and doesn't always get tested when returning. When he is in the house he also invites his girlfriend, eats out, sees friends, etc. In the microcovid test site I put 5 ppl house with 10 close contacts for lack of better options. Sounds reasonable?
Edit: Italy's vaccination rate sucks. Not gonna see a vaccine for me or anyone in the house with risky behavior till 2022
Ah... "always remain in the house" is not the right way to think about your options here. Your roommates are apparently acting about like the broader populace, and therefore have exposure rates about like the broader populace. If you want to have lower exposure rates than that, then the thing-you-need-to-do is not to always remain in the house, but rather to avoid significant exposure to your roommates.
Indeed, spending more time outside the house might be a good strategy.
My risk should be from 19% to 82% probability in the next six months. This, if I always remain in the house. In order to avoid that, I should put my life on hold and get a full-time job I dislike. And people call me exaggerated and crazy both IRL and online. Long-term consequences of Covid are what worry me the most. Idk how to deal with this tbh. Genuinely asking.
The result is more paranoia ,_,
Berkeley people have it good. At least they are doing this together. Imagine being a Berkeley person at heart and being in a completely anti-Berkeley environment.
I mean, the result I would hope for in such a situation is that social pressure would accelerate the probably-true realization that this level of paranoia simply does not make sense.
I thought lvl 10 wasn't about that anymore, but you may be right
Level 10's more ground-level explanation should be something like "If I say "There's not a lion across the river." I'm getting downvoted and if I say "There's a lion across the river" I'm getting upvoted?"
I'm trying to not use the expression "trying to mind control you". But stated this way it's not that different from lvl 3. Maybe lvl 10 is lvl 3 + an explicit selection mechanism such as upvotes or downvotes. But one could argue that such incentives exist regardless of how explicit they are.
Thanks for your service, Mingyuan. 10/10.
Does the fact that Alcor is co-owner create difficulties if you want to change cryonics provider at some point? Example: new tech (e.g. aldehyde stabilized cryopreservation) gets offered somewhere else but not at Alcor, so you want to change.
Nvm, I received confirmation and the answer was yes :)
From the Alcor Associate Member page:
...To become an Associate Member use our Associate Membership Form to send a check, money order, or credit card information ($5 per month or $60 per year) to Alcor Life Extension Foundation, 7895 E. Acoma Dr., Suite 110, Scottsdale, Arizona 85260, or call Marji Klima at (480) 905-1906 ext. 101 with your credit card information.
Or you can pay online via PayPal using the Join button below (quarterly option is not available this way). Please note that this will set up automatic recurring charges of either $5 per month or $60
I dont't know actually (for both questions). And I'm not sure how many billionaires like this there are.
The thing that's very unclear to me is why SENS has so little funding if that's framework is now consensus
Because they choose the most neglected (long-term/difficult/high-risk high-reward) projects within the Hallmark framework (I talked extensively about this in my posts if you want to take a peek).
This reminds me of the sentiment Eliezer expresses here:
...
When someone politely presents themselves with a careful argument, does your cultural software tell you that you're supposed to listen and make a careful response, or make fun of the other person and then laugh about how they're upset? What about when your own brain tries to generate a careful argument? Does your cultural milieu give you any examples of people showing how to really care deeply about something (i.e. debate consequences of paths and hew hard to the best one), or is everything you
I really really love this initiative. Reading LW in book form is just better for me. Online I get distracted and I read stuff as procrastination instead of deliberate effort. I've read the first two books of the sequences and HPMOR on Kindle and the experience is not even comparable with reading with a browser.
My posts here are basically all evaluations or considerations useful for cost-effectiveness evaluations. They are crossposted from the EA Forum. The most interesting ones for your purpose are probably:
- A general framework for evaluating aging research. Part 1: reasoning with Longevity Escape Velocity
- Why SENS makes sense
- Evaluating Life Extension Advocacy Foundation
I don't know if this has already been discussed, but why the daily deaths in every European country are 1/10th or less of lockdown levels but daily cases are two or three times higher? In the rest of the world daily deaths still seem to follow daily cases but in the US and Japan (to a lesser extent), in which daily deaths are about half of what they were in May (which is still not as extreme as Europe). I may be unaware of other countries in which this is the case.
I think your point was valid though, I changed the title to be less strong
This is an interesting comment, I think you bring up good points.
One reason why I didn't focus much on crowdfunding is that the money that goes in there is not really LEAF's, and it's just one among many focuses they have. If an EA decides to give money to LEAF (through the recurring campaign, or through a grant, for example) that money will probably not go to a crowdfunding campaign, and would probably not make much of an impact on how they decide who to crowdfund. It would go to their other projects. When donating to a campaign you donate to the specific...
In the past, I've donated to them and supported them in Project4Awesome, but I'm not inside the org. Basically, this is a post trying to evaluate it from an EA standpoint, in a similar way I did for SENS. Their budget should be the recurring campaign and single donations (which I don't expect to be much), the interview should probably make it clearer I hope.
Edit: the post is probably not very on topic for LW, but since I crossposted my analysis of aging research from an EA standpoint I wanted to put this here too for completeness.
I searched if there was a funny cat video called "what do you mean, Fetch?" and I found this. (Not that it was necessary for meaning though - sorry if this is noise).
Yes, I would find out, but later.
I'm inclined to think that if junk media (social media, news) were only useful for news, completely disregarding them would be probably the best action. Considering every other use though, I'm inclined to think the optimal is being able to reach a compromise of 20m per day maximum, although I'm not sure if it is possible without getting addicted. If it isn't it just might be best to get away, but I'm unsure.
There haven't been historical events that prompted me to react earlier than everyone else for now (not even covid, my city has never been the center of a big enough outbreak and I just abided to the lockdown rules. I can imagine that an earlier reaction could have been better if I lived in another country/city). The historical events that are important to react early to are probably the ones that would put me/my family/everyone else around in relatively sudden danger: war, political instability, coups, dangerous diseases, and probably other stuff. Things that happened just a handful of times in now developed countries during the twentieth century (maybe they won't happen again, but...).
I wouldn't have been this nervous 5 years ago, but it seems to me that the world is socially evolving faster now, and I think it's possible not to react fast enough on a historical event. But maybe I just have become more anxious? One other thing is: many times my life changed due to great fucking information I found while farting around the Internet, but at the same time this comes with all the drawbacks Isusr rightly identified. There is also the feeling that I have witnessed society and even art evolve by staying consistently online, and stopping feels like jumping out of a train. I'm not sure how I should act.
Did you discover COVID-19 earlier just due to keeping up with papers?
Do you keep up with news of any kind? If so, how? Don't you have fear of missing out something important which you should act upon (both good news or bad news or not even news but simply information)? Not necessarily politics or general news of course.
Comply's foam tips: they replace the more common tips for in-ear earphones and isolate you from the outside world much more than noise canceling. It's basically having earphones + earplugs, thanks to the foam. If you live in a noisy environment they may radically change your life for the better. You need to learn the correct procedure to fit them properly (it's easy, you can find videos on how to do it for earplugs. It is the same procedure). I recommend them for watching movies or reading/studying while listening to nature sounds.
A gaming c...
I really like this post. I think it is probably also relevant from an Effective Altruism standpoint (you identify a tractable and neglected approach which might have a big impact). I think you should probably crosspost this on the EA Forum, and think about if your other articles on the topic are apt to be published there. What do you think?
If you read my profile both here and on the EA Forum you'll find a lot of articles in which I'm trying to evaluate aging research. I'm making this suggestion because I think you are adding useful pieces.
Absolutely no one had thought of that in the YouTube comment section under his interview with JRE
He would probably say that he doesn't care (he works for others, not for himself) and that alchool doesn't affect him, since people already kind of noted this and the answers were these. But tbh, this whole thing is not that interesting to me, and I would classify it as weak evidence for what he belives or not. Usually it is mainly gossip.
Wow, ok, thank you. This is useful information. I didn't take your ADHD/ADD hypothesis seriously to be honest, but now that you specify the nature of the test to diagnose it, it makes much more sense. I will research more and get tested.
No, my experience is the gameplays I have seen. From what I've seen it seems very easy to communicate (via voice chat) and interact with environments, which are also very customizable. I don't know anything beyond this.
Thank you, I think I will try to pay attention if some "flickering" happens. It is a possibility.
It's uncanny how sometimes we all arrive at the same conclusions privately
Regarding "If a survey is performed, most people in the United States will say that curing aging is undesirable. 85%". One similar survey has already been done. The result depends if you specify that an unlimited lifespan would be in health and not in increasing frailty. If you do, > 40% of respondents opt for unlimited lifespan, otherwise 1%. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2015.00353/full
Would it be possible and cost-effective to release video courses at a much lower cost?
I know this conversation is very old and Holden has matured his outlook on the subject (see Open Philanthropy's grants to aging research, and Open Philanthropy's analysis of aging research, although still dismissive of SENS), but I still want to point out what I think were the mistakes he made here.
Holden didn't seem to get how different in scope the SENS' plan is from the kind of research that a single brilliant researcher can bring forward in the traditional way. SENS needs a plethora of different therapies that would require an enti...
About life extension see SENS Research Foundation as an example of specific org very focused on the moonshot, if you don't already know it.
Thanks a lot for writing this.
These disagreements mainly concern the relative power of future AIs, the polarity of takeoff, takeoff speed, and, in general, the shape of future AIs. Do you also have detailed disagreements about the difficulty of alignment? If anything, the fact that the future unfolds differently in your view should impact future alignment efforts (but you also might have other considerations informing your view on alignment).
You partially answer this in the last point, saying: "But, equally, one could view these theses pess... (read more)
Part of what makes it difficult for me to talk about alignment difficultly is that the concept doesn’t fit easily into my paradigm of thinking about the future of AI. If I am correct, for example, that AI services will be modular, marginally more powerful than what comes before, and numerous as opposed to monolithic, then there will not be one alignment problem, but many.
I could talk about potential AI safety principles, healthy cultural norms, and specific engineering issues, but not “a problem” called “aligning the AI” — a soft prerequisite for explainin... (read more)