All of TomStocker's Comments + Replies

I think its clearer then if you say sound institutions rather than the West?

8Journeyman
There are other countries with sound institutions, like Singapore and Japan, but I'm not so worried about them as I am about the West, because they have an eye towards self-preservation. For instance, both those countries have declining birth rates, but they protect their own rule of law (unlike the West), and have more cautious immigration policies that help avoid their population from being replaced by a foreign one (unlike the West). The West, unlike sensible Asian countries, is playing a dangerous game by treating its institutions in a cavalier way for ill-thought-out redistributionist projects and importing leftist voting blocs. EAs should also be more worried about decline in the West, because Westerners (particularly NW Europeans) are more into charity than other populations (e.g. Eastern Europeans are super-low in charity). My previous post documents this. A Chinese- or Russian- dominated future is really, really bad for EA, for existential risk prevention, and for AI safety.

"I'll take your word that many EAs also think this way, but I don't really see it effecting the main charitable recommendations. Followed to its logical conclusion, this outlook would result in a lot more concern about the West."

Can you elaborate please? From my perspective, just because a western citizen is more rich / powerful doesn't mean that helping to satisfy their preferences is more valuable in terms of indirect effects? Or are you talking about who to persuade because I don't see many EA orgs asking Dalit groups for their cash or time yet.

8Journeyman
It's not the preferences of the West that are inherently more valuable, it's the integrity of its institutions, such as rule of law, freedom of speech, etc... If the West declines, then it's going to have negative flow-through effects for the rest of the world.

Interesting that the solutions you're jumping to are about defending the 'west' and beating the south / east rather than working with the south/east to make sure the best of both is shared?

4Journeyman
To be clear, when I speak of defending the West, I am mostly thinking of defending the West against self-inflicted problems. Nobody is talking about "beating" the global south / east. If the West declines, then it won't be in a very good position to share anything with anyone.

So I think most EAs have come to the point where they realise that small trade offs and agonising over them displace other good things, so they try and find a way of setting a limit by year or whatever. But you know many people agonise and make trade offs, its just that often it isn't giving to the poor that's the counterfactual, it's saving or paying the mortgage, or buying a better holiday or school for their children or whatever. If you don't think like that, then you have everything you need?? http://www.givinggladly.com/ and http://www.jefftk.com/inde... (read more)

Leverage the insight from above, don't rule out all food some of the time, rule out some food all of the time. In other cultures outside the States, at least in many sections of society, these kinds of rules are followed. 1). No sweets, cakes, donuts, any mixes of fat and sugar (or at least never eat these on your own or when not celebrating something) 2). stick to meal times. ... then if that still doesn't work you can do things like buy smaller plates, rule out meat or dairy... there's always a rule that will fit.

Over-eating is probably more difficult for other reasons like image and identity, ideas of physical permanence, the brain chemistry.

My hunch is that encouraging people that have to manage an unpredictable or tricky health condition to predict and note their prediction of how good or bad an activity will be for their pain / energy / / mood / whatever else would be a very useful habit that both frees people up to do things and prevents them from doing too much of what hurts. Julia, have you or anyone from CFAR looked at partnering with a pain management or other type of disease management team or setting to see how many of the rationality skills would be helpful?

Welcome! There are loads of articles, so if it gets confusing, this is a decent place to start. https://intelligence.org/rationality-ai-zombies/

living in pain sent my carometer from below average to full. Seeing squalor definitely did something. I think it probably depends how you see it - did you talk to people as equals or see them as different types of people you couldn't relate to / didn't fit a certain criteria? Being surrounded by suffering from a young age doesn't seem to make people care - its being shocked by suffering after not having had much of it around that is occasionally very powerful - Like the story about the Buddha growing up in the palace then seeing sickness, death and age for the first time?

My feeling is that situations like being caught for doing something horrendous might or might not be subject to psychological adjustment - that many situations of suffering are subject to psychological adjustment and so might actually be not as bad as we though. But chronic intense pain, is literally unadjustable to some degree - you can adjust to being in intense suffering but that doesn't make the intense suffering go away. That's why I think its a special class of states of being - one that invokes action. What do people think?

Only when the opponent has a brain.

Indeed...  So does this count as weak evidence that our brains are built to outmaneuver other thinking creatures rather than purely random environmental phenomena? 

Obviously. Just important to remember that extremity of suffering is something we frequently fail to think well about.

6Kindly
Absolutely. We're bad at anything that we can't easily imagine. Probably, for many people, intuition for "torture vs. dust specks" imagines a guy with a broken arm on one side, and a hundred people saying 'ow' on the other. The consequences of our poor imagination for large numbers of people (i.e. scope insensitivity) are well-studied. We have trouble doing charity effectively because our intuition doesn't take the number of people saved by an intervention into account; we just picture the typical effect on a single person. What, I wonder, are the consequence of our poor imagination for extremity of suffering? For me, the prison system comes to mind: I don't know how bad being in prison is, but it probably becomes much worse than I imagine if you're there for 50 years, and we don't think about that at all when arguing (or voting) about prison sentences.

"The Lord Pilot shouted, fist held high and triumphant: "To live, and occasionally be unhappy!"" (three worlds collide) dust specks are just dust specks - in a way its helpful to sometimes have these things.

But the thing changes if you don't distribute the dust specks 1 per person but 10 per second per person?

1Quill_McGee
In the Least Convenient Possible World of this hypothetical, each and every dust speck causes a small constant amount of harm, with no knock-on effects(no increasing one's appreciation of the moments when one does not have dust in ones eye, no preventing a 'boring painless existence,' nothing of the sort). Now it may be argued whether this would occur with actual dust, but that is not really the question at hand. Dust was just chosen as being a 'seemingly trivial bad thing.' and if you prefer some other trivial bad thing, just replace that in the problem and the question remains the same.

Agree, having lived in chronic pain supposedly worse than untrained childbirth, I'd say that even an hour has a really seriously different possibility in terms of capacity for suffering than a day, and a day different from a week. For me it breaks down somewhere, even when multiplying between the 10^15 for 1 day and 10^21 for one minute. You can't really feel THAT much pain in a minute that is comparable to a day, even orders of magnitude? Its just qualitatively different. Interested to hear pushback on this

4Kindly
We could go from a day to a minute more slowly; for example, by increasing the number of people by a factor of a googolplex every time the torture time decreases by 1 second. I absolutely agree that the length of torture increases how bad it is in nonlinear ways, but this doesn't mean we can't find exponential factors that dominate it at every point at least along the "less than 50 years" range.

R(0) should be total historical spend right? Rather than annual spend?

0owencb
No, it's supposed to be annual spend. However it's worth noting that this is a simplified model which assumes a particular relationship between annual spend and historical spend (namely it assumes that spending has grown and will grow on an exponential).

Thanks Owen, really helpful article. Fluttershy - helpful comment, thanks!

Another potential application: developing a set of heuristics based on this to help people manage their chronic health conditions?