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All of Metus's Comments + Replies

Have you changed your mind recently?
Metus-20

Skimming your comment history it seems like the majority of your downvotes comes from expressing views inconsistent with the progressivist narrative on gender. LW now is overloaded with that.

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gjm240

My impression is that the problem isn't disagreement with, or disapproval of, his views so much as it's a feeling that (1) some topics he wants to talk about (his success or lack of it with women) don't really belong here and (2) the manner in which he talks about them is inappropriate. A few examples:

I often feel poly folks are basically epicifiying what I think is "I just wanna fuck".

(This was in a comment that's currently at +1-3; there were other not-terribly-impressive things in it, but my guess is that the quoted sentence is what got th... (read more)

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-4[anonymous]
My views are simply what I judge to be the best way to solve a problem in the most efficient manner that generates the most results. If people disagree with them, that's fine; but they ought to try and prove me incorrect instead of just giving me a minus one. Gender is no different and people ought to try and solve problems instead of typical minding or whatever other nonsense they spew rather than solve the fucking problem at hand.
Have you changed your mind recently?
Metus30

Yeah, I decided to leave LW.

Why?

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1[anonymous]
If you look at my profile you'd notice I have enough karma to look like a bible salesman. It seems like for whatever reason my comments are not appreciated if not depreciated. The annoying thing is that I'm repeatedly judged (downvoted) but am not given any explanation. Whatever's supposedly wrong with my comments isn't even being explained and it keeps happening enopugh for me to realize I'm not getting anything positive from commenting.
Stupid Questions February 2015
Metus30

There exists a mild market in organs. I can donate a kidney in exchange for a loved one getting a kidney. I also can donate my body to science, in exchange the institution - at least in Germany - pays for some kind of burial.

Immediate edit: Actually, since there exists a black market in organs we could make some estimates about prices and conditions on a legalised market in organs.

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Stupid Questions February 2015
Metus10

π seems like half the size it should be

That one you found out already, it would make it much more consistent with how similar constants are used.

The gravitational constant looks like off by a factor of 4π

Not sure what you mean. Do you mean when comparing the equation for gravitational force to the electric force? Or do you mean when looking at the 'intuitive' way of writing the differential equation

?

In either case it seems that the choice of 4π is arbitrary on one equation or the other. For example choosing Gaussian units introduces a 4π in the elec... (read more)

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4Strilanc
I would say cos is simpler than sin because its Taylor series has a factor of x knocked off. In practice they tend to show up together, though. Often you can replace the pair with something like e^(i x), so maybe that should be considered the simplest.
gjm100

I agree about gamma, cosine, and pi. I'm not troubled by the minus sign in the zeta function but suspect we should really be working with the related "xi function" whose symmetries are simpler. I'm not a very expert physicist but my guess is that the 4pi there is going to pop in one place or another and it doesn't matter very much which you choose.

The only one of these that I actually get cross about is the gamma function. With all the others, there are tradeoffs -- e.g., if you work with tau = 2pi instead of with pi, some things become simpler, ... (read more)

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[Link] An argument on colds
Metus60

European countries are way more lenient with workers who do not show up for health reasons. How does the data compare there, are workers more productive on average and sick less often?

Also, what is the unintended side effect of this? Do we open up an evolutionary niche for something even more horrible? Wouldn't it be better to require sick people to wear a face mask like it is usual in some Asian countries?

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5c_edwards
Typically with the evolution of pathogens, we see a trade-off between the ability of a pathogen to spread ("virulence") and the ability of the pathogen to keep the host alive (although there's definitely a lot of variation depending on the life history of the pathogen and the behavior of the host). Overall pathogen fitness (for between-host dynamics - it gets more complicated if the pathogen is competing with other pathogens within the host) is based on (virulence) x (number of other hosts that infected host contacts). So increasing host lifespan and increasing virulence both increase pathogen fitness (but, again, usually increasing one decreases the other). This means that we often see pathogens falling into two syndromes: a) Fast spreaders ("raiders") - because they spread rapidly, there is less selection for them to keep their host in good condition (and so it's better to sacrifice host health to increase spread rate). Alternately, because their host becomes ill rapidly, there is selection for them to be good at spreading. Example would be Ebola. b) slow spreaders ("farmers") - because they do not spread rapidly, there is selection for them to keep their host in good condition. Alternately, because their host is in good condition for a long time, there is less selection for them to be good at spreading. Extreme versions of this are pathogens that are largely/entirely transmitted vertically (mothers pass pathogen to offspring). Because the host's fitness is a part/all of the pathogen's fitness, there is strong selection for the pathogen to keep the host alive (and even to boost host fitness). A super interesting example of this can be found in the arthropod bacteria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolbachia, where some Wolbachia species have evolved into mutualistic relationships with hosts. (But because Wolbachia is only passed from mothers to children, many species change the sex ratio of offspring of infected individuals to be all female. Biology is awesome!) D
LINK: Diseases not sufficiently researched
Metus20

[Seperate post, because it is a seperate point]

I wonder how a "rational" funding system would look like if an economist designed it. The expression "where researchers see the most potential for a breakthrough" under the constraint of competition over limited resources just screams "market mechanism" to me.

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7[anonymous]
It seems to me that one characteristic of the optimal funding system would be very high funding/burden ratios for contagious diseases with catastrophic worst-case scenarios (e.g. Ebola), holding all other things like P(Breakthrough) equal. A market-based system might not have this characteristic, especially if a "free rider" problem arises.
LINK: Diseases not sufficiently researched
Metus50

It seems to me that research funding is surprisingly well calibrated with a bias for infectous diseases as opposed to what I as an amateur would call "structural failure" collecting ischemic heart disease, stroke, injury and so on.

Looking at the "overfunded" category the worst offenders are HIV and cancer. I suppose cancer research is overfunded because people donate to causes their loved ones suffered and cancer tends to kill old people with a lot of money. But I have no good explanation for the overfunding of HIV which is a completely... (read more)

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2ChristianKl
Condom usage reduces the changes of getting infected via sex by ~90% not 99.9%.
9[anonymous]
I too was incredibly surprised to see how close everything lies to the 1:1 line. Most overfunded only 16% over the line? Most underfunded 11% below? Holy crap, the people behind that deserve a medal. I suspect cancer is probably at least partially up because there's so many subfields of cancer that don't always behave like each other. There's breast cancer, skin cancer, pancreatic cancer... a lot of the time you need to do separate research on each, and that kind of duplication might spill over into money applied. Could HIV funding levels being a bit over the ratio be a result of recent declines in disease burden but an unchanged allocation? Antiretrovirals have massively decreased the burden on the big overhang of those who got the disease over the decade before they were developed, at least in developed countries, and at least until resistant strains develop. Or perhaps the desire to end an expanding disease, thus taking into account future levels of expanded burden? It's not like advances in treating HIV are intended only for the US where the only reason it's still expanding is that the people who are infected live on for decades while on average not 'replacing' thesmselves (you can see a small dip in the number of people with the disease in the nineties, as new infection rates declined but before antiretrovirals kept those with the disease alive longer). Most of the bad effect is centered in Africa where its growing much much more rapidly. And I don't think it being preventable really enters into these calculations, as prevention has obviously not actually worked in many places. Though prevention should obviously be a big fraction of the effort against it. As for Inury being underfunded, isn't it also the case that 'research' on injury has been going on for as long as there have been people, whereas molecular biology and germ theory and the like have opened up new vistas in treating communicable diseases and many other things only in the last century or two?
1gwern
I found the 'injury' entry too, but I'm not sure it is a good target for improving. 'injury' is broad. I know what HIV is, and I have a good idea of what researchers might do to improve it ('develop a vaccine'; 'discover a new drug'), but what does one do with a category like 'injury'? Presumably this category embraces everything from burning yourself on a stove to falling on ice to heavy machinery at work killing you; there's not one or a few different problems there, but thousands of distinct ones which have next to no causal mechanisms in common. (And people are frustrated by cancers...!) So research may have counterintuitively low ROI: OK, so you managed to cut stove burns by say 10% using your extremely expensive public health campaign to switch as many houses as possible from electric coils to induction heating, but stove burns were only say 5% of all accidents in the first place so your ROI works out to be terrible compared to dumping even more money into HIV or something.
-2bramflakes
one would think so but certain demographics can't seem to handle this
6JoshuaZ
In the case of HIV there are likely a variety of different functions going on: First political organization: dealing with HIV became connected to the gay rights movement, especially when religious figures and politicians who were not happy with the gay rights movement said that gays deserved it or that it was punishment from God or otherwise mocked what was happening. Second, HIV has a long time from diagnosis to when it becomes AIDS. This makes it a disease where the people with it can actively take part and lobby for more funding- since the primary treatments put the disease merely in check rather than curing it, the medical results make this tendency more strong rather than less strong. Third, the massive increase in HIV cases in the 1980s made it seem like a disease that was a general threat to the population, and people are still riding that assumption. Fourth, HIV is a disease that in principle (and sometimes in practice) can arise in a variety of different populations: the presence of people who received it from blood transfusions helped make it feel more like a disease threatening the general population (this connects in the obvious way to point three), and this combined with the presence of HIV+ babies to give a strong emotional aspect.
LINK: Guinea worm disease close to eradication
Metus100

Rinderpest was a disease in cattle we have eradicated. We are also making progress on on some more. Let's hope that this does not have any unintended horrible consequences like opening the ecosystem of human parasites to something potentially more deadly.

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Why you should consider buying Bitcoin right now (Jan 2015) if you have high risk tolerance
Metus100

It would be an interesting analysis to find out how many traditional players are involved and to derive from that confidence in the optimality of the bitcoin price.

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5William_Quixote
I am not very knowledgeable about bitcoins but I do have some famiality with banks responsiblies under US and EU anti money laundering regimes. I think that bit coins would pose a number of complience challenges and that it would be pretty tough for banks to be confidbet they weren't running afoul of regs. So my guese is that but coins probably have very little bank activity. Similarly I bet they don't have much activity from the large hedge funds. It's probabky limited to small funds.
2015 Repository Reruns - Boring Advice Repository
Metus60

Further adding on that: Depending on the legal structure of the retirement fund, it can serve as a replacement for smaller insurances or you can have your children inherit it. Or have donated to charity upon your death.

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2015 Repository Reruns - Boring Advice Repository
Metus100

You very probably have not all recommended insurances in your country of residence or your mandatory insurance doesn't cover everything you'd want it to cover. Same goes for savings, you don't save enough for old age and emergencies. Basically if at some point you would have had to do something to prepare for the future, you didn't do it.

The short version about insurance is this: Never insure anything where you can go "damn it" and pay in cash, the same rule goes for deductibles. On the reverse, insure anything that you absolutely have to pay for... (read more)

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Alsadius100

A couple addendums:

1) If you have a family, your death goes on the "would financially ruin you" list. If anyone needs you, you need life insurance - and term is extremely cheap(I just sold a couple half a million each for $50/mo), so don't use money as an excuse unless you're destitute or extremely ill. To a lesser extent, disability insurance(though it tends to be pricier).

2) You may not want to ever retire, but the human body in old age is a very insistent creature. Plan on retiring. Better to have and not need than need and not have.

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Inverse relationship between belief in foom and years worked in commercial software
Metus10

Another way to ask the question is, assuming that IQ is the relevant measure, is there a sublinear, linear or superlinear relationship between IQ and productivity? Same question for cost of raising the IQ by one point, does it increase, decreasy or stay constant with IQ? Foom occurs for suitable combinations in this extremely simple model.

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Open thread, Dec. 29, 2014 - Jan 04, 2015
Metus-20

Without a simplicity prior you would need some other kind of distribution.

You can act "as if" by just using the likelihood ratios and not operating with prior and posterior probabilities.

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Open thread, Dec. 29, 2014 - Jan 04, 2015
Metus80

Indeed, I run on carbohydrates, not my computer.

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Open thread, Dec. 29, 2014 - Jan 04, 2015
Metus120

A question for specialists on EA.

If I live in a place where I can choose between a standard mix of electricity sources consisting of hydrocarbons, nuclear and renewables, and a "green" mix of renewables exclusively that costs more, should I buy the green mix or buy the cheaper/cheapest mix and donate the difference to GiveWell?

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3ChristianKl
In Germany I'm not sure that you increase the amount of green energy that get produced by making a choice to be on a plan that "uses" green energy. The German energy market isn't free in the sense that you can raise demand for green energy to raise supply of green energy. We have laws that everyone who wants to sell green energy into the market gets a gurantee that the energy is brought for a decent price.
jefftk160

I'd break this down into two questions:

  • Would it be better for you to pay for a neighbor of yours to switch to the green mix or give that money to GiveWell?
  • Is there something special about the energy you use coming from renewable sources as opposed to the energy someone else uses?

For the first question, subsidising renewable energy is probably a good thing, but there's no reason to expect this particular opportunity to be up there with the world's best organizations. For the second it doesn't seem to me that it matters. So I'd say buy the normal stuff and give the difference to the best organization you can find.

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9polymathwannabe
Perhaps you meant hydrocarbons instead of carbohydrates.
2015 New Years Resolution Thread
Metus20

Am I unusually dense or is the site unusually inaccessible with regards to relevant advice re internships and generally?

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0Dorikka
The format seems to have changed since I last visited the site, so not sure. You might want to apply for coaching and indicate the information that you are looking for and have been unable to find - they might be able to filter out which info is relevant to your situation. Your comment might also be useful feedback to them, as it is often difficult to find out why people dislike a website.
2015 New Years Resolution Thread
Metus00

Thank you very much! I will take you up on that offer.

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1homunq
Electology is an organization dedicated to improving collective decision making — that is, voting. We run on a shoestring; somewhere in the lowish 5 digits $ per year. We've helped get organizations such as the German Pirate Party and the various US stat Libertarian Parties to use approval voting, and gotten bills brought up in several states (no major victories so far, but we're just starting.) Is a better voting system worth it, even if most people still vote irrationally? I'd say emphatically yes. Plurality voting is just a disaster as a system, filled with pathological results, perverse incentives, and pernicious equilibria. Credible numerical estimates (utility-based simulations) suggest that better systems such as approval voting offer as much improvement again as the move from dictatorship to democracy was.
2amcknight
Charity Science, which fundraises for GiveWell's top charities, needs $35k to keep going this year. They've been appealing to non-EAs from the Skeptics community and lot's of other folks and kind of work as a pretty front-end for GiveWell. More here. (Full disclosure, I'm on their Board of Directors.)
0Gleb_Tsipursky
Well, Intentional Insights is a Rationality-themed nonprofit dedicated to spreading rationality to a broad audience and thus raising the sanity waterline. We have recently received our official nonprofit designation so haven't had time to plan out and run a fundraiser as such, but we are accepting donations, and they are tax-deductible: anything you give, whether in time/skills/money, would be super-helpful. We especially appreciate those who become monthly donors, as that allows us to plan ahead and also show other potential donors and granting agencies that we have a good base of support and can bring our mission into the world well. We would be happy to talk more to you on the phone/Skype about this matter if you wish, and/or you can donate on the website itself directly. The donation button is on the top left of the website home page, and the monthly recurring donation indication is just below the donation button itself.
2015 New Years Resolution Thread
Metus40

I am not going to start a lengthy discussion on this subject as this is not the place for it, so please do not read the lack of any further answers as anything else than the statemet above. That being said ...

I am not completely sold on the premise that all human lives are equal which puts the whole idea of a cheaper saved life in question. I am not donating out of a moral imperative but personal preference so my donations exhibit decreasing marginal utility making diversification a necessity. And finally I have generally massive skepticism towards anythin... (read more)

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3Kaura
Thanks! No need for a lengthy debate, I'm just very curious about how people decide where to donate, especially when the process leads to explicitly non-EA decisions. Your reasons are in fact pretty close to what I would have guessed, so I suppose similar intuitions are quite common and might explain part of why an idea as obvious as effective altruism took so long to develop. But yeah, a subthread about this in the OT sounds like a good idea (unless I can find lots of old discussions on the subject).
2015 New Years Resolution Thread
Metus50

Personally it sems that number of commits is a metric too easy to game. If you generally are honest with yourself, keep it, but I wouldn't use it if I were to set a goal for a group of students. Another metric that is less easy to game on a personal level is time spent with your programming environment open, which is effective if you tend to either not start programming or stop prematurely. Finally the ideal metric is to have a set of features or a certain output you want to achieve and have that as a goal with the caveat that these goals tend to be too ha... (read more)

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2015 New Years Resolution Thread
Metus40

Great list! Hope you don't mind a couple of questions.

Thanks! There would be little point in posting to a discussion board if I wasn't expecting discussion.

Any particular reason to donate to Wikipedia? I ask because I just read this interesting article about Wikimedia donations that was posted on the FB EA thread a few days ago.

Until a few minutes ago I thought that people would on average not donate enough to Wikipedia enough. Actually, my thought was more like "Wikipedia was so useful in the past and I expect it to be useful in the future too... (read more)

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4Kaura
Interesting, why is this? Do you mean effective altruism as a concept, or the EA movement as it currently is?
2015 New Years Resolution Thread
Metus80

My list of goals, nice habits to have and general goodness tends to grow in length instead of shrinking for various reasons but I can make progress anyhow in implementing it. Also I know that having way too many goals at once is harmful, so here's the obvious caveat: This is a general list and brainstorming so far, with no real plan for realiable implementation, so take the goals, the length of the list and the commentary with the proverbial grain of salt. (Legend: "I vow" is certain, "I will" actually means "maybe")

  • Charity:

... (read more)
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0Dorikka
It might be worth reading through some of the stuff by 80,000 Hours re jobs, internships, etc. Apologies for spam if you already know of them. :)
3[anonymous]
Hooray! Счастливого Нового года вам, и пусть у вас все получится. If you ever feel like you don't get enough exercise in Russian, just drop a line to me or any other Russian speaker here.maybe the are Spaniards around, too-who knows?..
5Andy_McKenzie
Great list! Hope you don't mind a couple of questions. Any particular reason to donate to Wikipedia? I ask because I just read this interesting article about Wikimedia donations that was posted on the FB EA thread a few days ago. Also, how many applications per month?
Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014
Metus20

Exercise.

But more seriously, try asking this again in the next open thread, this one seems flooded.

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1Ritalin
Actually exercise has been suggested to me as the alternative to drugs. "Spinning", specifically. Addictive, very pleasurable, and makes you healthier (unless you overdo it, but sports are much more difficult to overdo than drugs, for some reason).
Kickstarting the audio version of the upcoming book "The Sequences"
Metus10

I don't, sorry, that's why I was asking. Sometimes publishers have unreasonable delays when publishing in other jurisdictions than the US because of licencing problems but that should not be a problem if all participants agree.

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1Rick_from_Castify
It will be on Audible, I'm not sure if they have restrictions on where it will be available globally. Do you know more Metus? This will be the first book that we've personally put onto Audible. We certainly want it to be available globally. It will also be available on iTunes.
Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014
Metus10

Reduced consumption of animal products, more specifically meat should help my health and both my purse and the global poor through reduced food prices. For reducing meat consumption in general it seems easy to just replace meat in a lot of dishes with cheese or substitute meaty dishes with some scrambled eggs. What can I do for variety? I am especially looking for cheap, fast and/or convenient methods to put together a meal. I am very willing to trade off fast for the other two as I can listen to audiobooks or similar while preparing food.

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1DanielLC
Chickens produce more meat than eggs in a given time-period. I originally encountered this when reading about animal cruelty, but I would expect the same would apply to saving money and lowering the demand for food. If anything, you should be replacing eggs with meat.
0DanielFilan
Stirfries can be cheap, fast, convenient, and healthy. Dahl (lentil stew) is slow to make, but cheap and convenient.
Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014
Metus20

Also the German name suggests European location which means that fraternities are pretty much dead around here.

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Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014
Metus10

The theoretical question still stands.

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Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014
Metus210

One thing I might start experimenting with is a version of morning contemplation. Ancient stoicism seems to suggest to reflect on one's principles in the morning, christian tradition has morning prayers and Benjamin Franklin reviewed his virtues every morning, so why not do a little personalised version of it? Things like the serenity prayer or Tarski's litany.

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Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014
Metus20

Interesting answer. Seeing as my personal giving is completely out of pleasure not some kind of moral obligation, the argument for diversification is very strong.

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4Nisan
Ah. Well, then there doesn't seem to be anything to debate here. If you want to do what makes you happy, then do what makes you happy.
Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014
Metus140

I am looking to set a morning routine for myself and wanted to hear if you have some unusual component in your morning routine other people might benefit from.

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1FiftyTwo
[Meta] I often see threads like this where people recommend things that require a very high level of conscientiousness or planning ability to start with, (e.g. if you are tired in the mornings get out of bed immediately and do x, requirs you to be capable of forcing yourself to do x when you are tired.)
3[anonymous]
Shower first. Then make breakfast/coffee.
9jsteinhardt
I exercise for 5 minutes within 5 minutes of getting up. Before I did this, I sometimes had the habit of checking e-mail for like an hour before getting out of bed. After adding this to my routine, I never did that again.
5vernvernvern
I have gotten myself a manual coffee grinder. Using this device it takes me about 4 minutes to grind enough beans for a large Melitta pot. Attending to this repetitive task gives me a small but regular block of time during which I find it easy to practice mindfullness. And when I am done, I make a pot of coffee.
6WalterL
I forget who suggested it, but I actually needed 2 alarm clocks to get my sleep schedule under control. One wakes me up. It is across the room, on my computer chair. When I goes off I move it up to the shelf. Something about doing a task makes me loathe to go back to bed. One makes me go to sleep. When it goes off, I stand up and put it on the computer chair. That way I can't keep browsing the net, because I'm stuck standing up. This was only necessary for like a week. Once I was going to bed at the same time every day I didn't need alarms to wake up then. Nowadays I wake up almost automatically. The key for me was going to bed at a set hour every day.
3SodaPopinski
One part is writing down whatever dreams I can remember right upon awaking. This has led to me occasionally experiencing lucid dreams without really trying. Also since I am writing dreams anyway, this makes it easy to do the other writing which I find beneficial. Namely, writing the major plan of the day and gratitude stuff.
4MrMind
I don't know how unusual these are, but some of the components of my routine are: * putting the alarm on the other side of the room, so I get sure I don't snooze; * workout with a 10 min torcher; * cold shower after workout; * a brief five minutes meditation before leaving.
Metus210

One thing I might start experimenting with is a version of morning contemplation. Ancient stoicism seems to suggest to reflect on one's principles in the morning, christian tradition has morning prayers and Benjamin Franklin reviewed his virtues every morning, so why not do a little personalised version of it? Things like the serenity prayer or Tarski's litany.

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9drethelin
I think the best thing is to start implementing it as soon as you get up, to not give yourself time/opportunity to sabotage it. Also, get up as soon as you wake up.
5Dorikka
I get my shower the night to keep my bed clean and reduce morning prep time, allowing me to wake up later. Then just wet my hair with water in the morning for combing. I also have an Ensure as soon as I wake up, even if I'm going to have a more substantial breakfast shortly thereafter, because otherwise I'm a zombie.
bramflakes170

I have a terrible problem where I wake up from my alarm, turn off the alarm, then go back to sleep (I've missed several morning lectures this way). The solution I've been trialing is to put a glass of water and some caffeine pills on my bedside table when I go to sleep. That way, when I wake up I can turn off the alarm, take the pill and give in to the urge to put my head back on the pillow, confident that the caffeine will wake me up again a few minutes later. This has worked every time I've remembered to put out the pills.

I got this idea from someone else on LW but I've forgotten who, so credit to whomever it was.

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3Gondolinian
You might be interested in this, if you haven't already seen it.
Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014
Metus10

I want to open up the debate again whether to split donations or to concentrate them in one place.

One camp insists on donating all your money to a single charity with the highest current marginal effectiveness. The other camp claims that you should split donations for various reasons ranging from concerns like "if everyone thought like this" to "don't put all your eggs in one basket." My position is firmly in the second camp as it seems to me obvious that you should split your donations just as you split your investments, because of ris... (read more)

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0banx
Isn't it the case that most investment opportunities have essentially the same expected returns, due to market efficiency? In that case you want to diversify, since you can lower the variance without lowering the expected return. But if you can identify a single giving opportunity that has a significantly higher expected return than the alternatives, then it seems like you'd want to concentrate on that one opportunity.
0Alsadius
Most people give to charity because it makes them feel good - knowing you're helping people is a warm fuzzy feeling that most people enjoy. Obviously this can lead to irrationality pretty easily - look at the ineffective charities kept alive by nice narratives - but if we take that as the base reason, then standard human loss aversion can explain splitting. Your goal isn't to improve the world per se, but instead to have your money improve the world. In other words, the argument about linearity of utility disappears, because one bad decision will destroy all the value you get from charity, and since that value is partially independent of the expected value of the good done in the world, this can happen even if you're investing in the charity with the highest EV. I don't 100% agree with this, but it's fairly close to my gut feeling - I split my political donations, but not my humanitarian donations.
3Evan_Gaensbauer
This depends on what someone believes the worthiest target for their donations is. If they're trying to optimize for goals that require the continuance of Earth-originating intelligence, or humanity, than they'll probably want to prevent human extinction. If they believe humanity faces a Great Filter or an existential risk in the coming decades, they'll want to donate eventually. Supposedly they'd drive money to organizations will decrease the chances of humanity being destroyed. Of course, this still leaves the consideration that if they invest very well, or invest at the right time, (and know how to identify those things), such that money invested now for period t, increased to value n(x), will be worth more to the target organization at the end of period t, than the original value of money, x, is worth to the organization now. However, its been argued from within effective altruism that the longer you wait to do good, the less the good you do will be worth. A donation is worth more now than later; effort applied at a later time will result in less value than the same level of effort applied now. This is called the haste consideration. Over time, the marginal increase in value of an investment over time comes up against the (presumed) marginal decrease of donation at any given time. I figure one could try measuring or calculating the rates of change here, and then figuring out some point at which the curves of them cross which would provide the optimum time to withdraw money from investment and donate it for maximum impact. However, that seems difficult. I'm not aware of something like this previously being done, and I follow effective altruism closely. So, if this has all been quantified, that report hasn't been widely circulated. This seems all the more important on LessWrong, because users on this site are more likely to care about existential risk reduction, whether they identify with effective altruism or not. Also, one could estimate a time past which inve
8Capla
...then, what? Every dollar of charity would be most efficiently invested and we'd solve the highest impact problems before moving on to others? What happens if everyone thinks like this?
5Nisan
I believe donating to the best charity is essentially correct, for the reason you state. You won't find much disagreement on Less Wrong or from GiveWell. Whether that's obvious or not is a matter of opinion, I suppose. Note that in GiveWell's latest top charity recommendations, they suggest splitting one's donation among the very best charities for contingent reasons not having to do with risk aversion. If you had some kind of donor advised fund that could grow to produce an arbitrarily large amount of good given enough time, that would present a conundrum. It would be exactly the same conundrum as the following puzzle: Suppose you can say a number, and get that much money; which number do you say? In practice, however, our choices are limited. The rule against perpetuities prevents you from donating long after your lifetime; and opportunities to do good with your money may dry up faster than your money grows. Holden Karnofsky has some somewhat more practical considerations.
solipsist100

  1. Your utility function need not be completely linear, just locally linear. If your utility function measures against the total good done in the world, your effect on the world will be small enough to be locally linear

  2. Most people don't want to optimize the total good done, but instead care about the amount of good they do. People donate to charity until the marginal utility they derive from purchasing moral satisfaction falls below the marginal utility they derive from purchasing other things. In this case, diversification makes sense, because utility

... (read more)
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Harper's Magazine article on LW/MIRI/CFAR and Ethereum
Metus70

US Americans are overly obsessed with hygiene from the point of view of the average European.

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Estimating the cost-effectiveness of research
Metus90

This is an extremely important question to ask and to research, not to speak of answering it properly. It complements the EA community very nicely and can then help to answer questions like "Should I donate to GiveWell or MIRI?" I am very interested in your results.

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Kickstarting the audio version of the upcoming book "The Sequences"
Metus30

If the ebook is available at a reasonable price on the Amazon store Germany I'll buy a copy. If not I'll be waiting for the hardcopy version which I'll buy anyhow.

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Kickstarting the audio version of the upcoming book "The Sequences"
Metus00

Then I'll be waiting for it to appear in the Audible catalogue, assuming it will be available world-wide, specifically Germany. As a student $50 is way too much, especially since I want to get the hard copy in addition, but €10 (about $13) is quite realistic.

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Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014
Metus160

Physics: "what is energy?"

I am a graduate student of physics and I am inclined to say that I now know even less about what energy is.

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4gjm
Oh, that's easy. It's just another word for wakalixes. (Two irrelevant remarks: 1. Sorry, that webpage is eyeball-bleedingly ugly. 2. I conjecture that the last two words in the excerpt are why HPMOR!Harry chose to give his army a name that enabled him to call himself General Chaos. I suspect, more precisely, that at some point Eliezer read that bit of Surely you're joking... and thought "hmm, General Chaos would be a good name for a supervillain or something".)
4Manfred
Hm. If I had to give an answer, I'd say it's the stuff that's conserved because the laws of physics don't change over time. But that's pretty theoretical - maybe an extensional definition would be better.
0Emile
Maybe completely blanking on that question is a sign of having studied some physics?
Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014
Metus50

Chemistry: "What is a bond between two atoms?" or "What is a reaction?"

Linguistics: "What is a word?" or "What is a language?"

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Open thread, Dec. 1 - Dec. 7, 2014
Metus10

Say I have have a desktop with a monitor, a laptop, a tablet and a smart phone. I am looking for creative ideas on how to use them simultaneously, for example when programming to use the tablet for displaying documentation and having multiple screens via desktop computer and laptop, while the smart phone displays some tertiary information.

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2eeuuah
The biggest hangup I've found in using multiple computers simultaneously is copy pasting long strings. I can chat them to myself, but it's still slightly awkwarder than I'd like. Otherwise, Sherincall is pretty on point.
4Sherincall
Unplug the desktop monitor and plug it in the laptop. Open some docs on the tablet. Keep your todo list on the phone. Or just get another monitor or two and use that. In my experience, you never need more than 3 monitors at once (for one computer, of course).
Good things to have learned....
Metus230

[Meta] The answers will be way more informative if they are posted as "X instead of doing/learning Y" e.g. "Underwater basket weaving instead of moping around" as of course I wished I had learned everything.

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The new GiveWell recommendations are out: here's a summary of the charities
Metus10

Thank you.

Which I suppose it is, to some extent for most people, but it seems like it shouldn't and it's unfortunate to be encouraging that mode of thinking.

You don't encourage it, you use it. It will be there no matter what you do as humans are social creatures under heavy competition. We can speculate about the reasons but it is what it is.

Would be happier with a calculator that instead suggests an equivalent of the money to be donated considering tax-deductibility? I am imagining something like "You can donate $10k per year to do X, equivalent ... (read more)

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1gjm
It will, I'm sure, but I think the boundary between using and encouraging is a fuzzy one. (So, I guess, is the boundary between discouraging and denying. For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying we shouldn't pretend people don't care about relative status. Just that we shouldn't prompt them to think in those terms.) Yes, I think that would be healthier.
Open thread, Dec. 1 - Dec. 7, 2014
Metus10

How do you track and control your spending? Disregarding financial privacy I started paying with card for everything which allows me to track where I do spend my money but not really on what. I find that I in general spend less than what I earn because spending money somehow hurts.

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0hyporational
I did a rough estimation of my normal monthly costs of living and then added a small amount for fun. The rest of my monthly paycheck gets semi-automatically invested in ETFs and can't be used without transaction costs. I have a small buffer account that I can use for unexpected expenses and if this happens I'll be aware of it the next month and try to spend less and grow the buffer account.
3Robin_Hartell
MoneyDashboard.com - links directly to my credit cards and bank accounts. I hear that the US equivalent is mint.com
2Alsadius
My income is variable and hasn't been great lately. As a result, several months ago I flipped the "I'm poor!" switch that's been lingering in my brain since I was a student, and so I avoid almost all unnecessary spending(a small recreation budget is allowed, for sanity, but otherwise it's necessities and business expenses only). Every few months I review spending to see if there's any excessive categories, but my intuition has been pretty good. And yeah, everything on plastic. Not even because of tracking, mostly because Visa gives me 1% cash back, which is a better bribe than anyone else offers.
0Manfred
Once you have a few thousand socked away, remember to start investing and picking up your free money.
4Richard_Kennaway
I have a spreadsheet in which I record every financial transaction, and enter all future transactions, estimated as necessary, out to a year ahead. Whenever I get a bank statement, credit card statement, or the like, I compare everything in it with the spreadsheet and correct things as necessary. I don't try to keep track of cash spent out of my pocket. I tried that once, but found it wasn't practical. The numbers would never add up and there would be no independent record to check them against. One row of the spreadsheet computes my total financial assets, which I observe ticking upwards month by month. I don't record in detail what I buy, only the money spent and where (which is a partial clue to what I bought). I'm sufficiently well off that I don't need to plan any of my expenditure in detail, only consider from time to time whether I want to direct X amount of my resources in the way I observe myself doing. I spend less than I earn, because it seems to me that that is simply what one does, if one can, in a sensibly ordered life.
Open thread, Dec. 1 - Dec. 7, 2014
Metus50

Thank you. It is a bit of a shame that it is so complicated to donate tax-efficiently from one EU country to another. I can understand complications going from the US to the EU member states and vice versa but this is plenty strange.

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The new GiveWell recommendations are out: here's a summary of the charities
Metus60

Thank you for your work.

On the Giving What We Can website (or some other from the same memespace) there is (or was, as I can't find it anymore) an extremely powerful calculator that upon input of your income calculates what your current relative position in the world is, how much it would be reduced by their recommended donation and what good this money could do in terms of physical action (like 23 people dewormed) and expected lifes saved. All the long discussion is extremely valuable but should be put aside to make these kind of visualisations more visib... (read more)

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8gjm
Here it is. (If your after-tax family income is $100k, for a 2-adult 0-child family in the US then you're in the top 0.8% before giving 10% and the top 1.0% after, and this is alleged to be equivalent to saving 3 lives per year. Make it $50k/year and it's top 3.9% -> top 4.7% and 1 life per year. In the other direction, at $200k/year it's top 0.1% -> top 0.1% and 6 lives. I don't know how compelling those numbers would be to the people they're relevant to. For the avoidance of doubt, I am able to halve and double the number 3, but rounding could have affected the figures a little.) I have a bit of an uneasy feeling about comparing your wealth percentile before and after. It rather gives the impression that your reason for wanting to earn more is to be ahead of as much of the population as possible. Which I suppose it is, to some extent for most people, but it seems like it shouldn't and it's unfortunate to be encouraging that mode of thinking. (I guess that the actual intended thought process is less "well, OK, I'll still be in the top 0.6%, which is good enough for me, so I'll go ahead and donate" but "well, I suppose it's kinda indecent to begrudge a bit of my income when even after donating I'll be in such a privileged position in global terms" -- which isn't quite so bad, but still doesn't seem like how anyone ought to be thinking about their income.)
Open thread, Dec. 1 - Dec. 7, 2014
Metus60

Nerds tend to undervalue anything that is not math-heavy or easily quantifiable.

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Open thread, Dec. 1 - Dec. 7, 2014
Metus60

Also note that there is information on tax-deductibility of donations outside of the U.S. on that site. If you are paying a lot of income tax you might be able to get some money back, donate even more or some combination of those two.

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9tog
Even more easily, you can visit this interactive tool I made and it'll tell you which charities are tax-deductible or tax-efficient in your country, and give you the best links to them. It also has a dropdown covering 18 countries, including some in which tax-efficient routes are far from obvious.
Open thread, Dec. 1 - Dec. 7, 2014
Metus50

This is for the people versed in international and tax law.

By a ruling of the ECJ all tax-payers in the EU can deduct charitable donations to any organisation within the EU from their taxes. In Germany at least this means that the charitability has to be certified by the German authorities. The usual process here is that a legal entity wishing to accept tax-deductible donations has to document how their funds are used and can then issue certificates to donors which then document the tax-deductibility of their donations.

Which leads to a couple of ideas and ... (read more)

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