multifoliaterose

However, when I take a "disinterested altruism" point of view x-risk looms large: I would rather bring 100 trillion fantastic lives into being than improve the quality of life of a single malaria patient.

What's your break even point for "bring 100 trillion fantastic lives into being with probability p" vs. "improve the quality of a single malaria patient" and why?

Replying toGlobal warming is a better test of irrationality that theism

multifoliaterose14y

Global warming is a better test of irrationality that theism

The occasional contrarians who mount fundamental criticism do this with a tacit understanding that they've destroyed their career prospects in the academia and closely connected institutions, and they are safely ignored or laughed off as crackpots by the mainstream. (To give a concrete example, large parts of economics clearly fit this description.)

I don't find this example concrete. I know very little about economics ideology. Can you give more specific examples?

Replying to[LINK] Nuclear winter: a reminder

multifoliaterose14y

[LINK] Nuclear winter: a reminder

It seems almost certain that nuclear winter is not an existential risk in and of itself but it could precipitate a civilizational collapse from which it's impossible to recover (e.g. because we've already depleted too much of the low hanging natural resource supply). This seems quite unlikely, maybe the chance conditional on nuclear winter is between 1 and 10 percent. Given that governments already consider nuclear war to be a national security threat and that the probability seems much lower than x-risk due to future technologies it seems best to focus on other things. Even if nothing direct can be done about x-risk from future technologies, movement building seems better than nuclear risk reduction.

Replying toHeuristics and Biases in Charity

multifoliaterose14y

Heuristics and Biases in Charity

So part of what I think is going on here is that giving to statistical charity is a slippery slope. There is no one number that it's consistent to give: if I give $10 to fight malaria, one could reasonably ask why I didn't give $100; if I give $100, why not $1000; and if $1000, why not every spare cent I make? Usually when we're on a slippery slope like this, we look for a Schelling point, but there are only two good Schelling points here: zero and every spare cent for the rest of your life. Since most people won't donate every spare cent, they stick to "zero". I first

multifoliaterose14y

How do you notice when you're rationalizing?

Cue: Non-contingency of my arguments (such that the same argument could be applied to argue for conclusions which I disagree with).

Replying toHow do you notice when you're rationalizing?

multifoliaterose14y

How do you notice when you're rationalizing?

Bob: "We shouldn't do question three this way; you only think so because you're a bad writer". My mouth/brain: "No, we should definitely do question three this way! [because I totally don't want to think I'm a bad writer]"

It's probably generically the case that the likelihood of rationalization increases with the contextual cue of a slight. But one usually isn't aware of this in real time.

Replying toWhat happens when your beliefs fully propagate

multifoliaterose14y

What happens when your beliefs fully propagate

I find this comment vague and abstract, do you have examples in mind?

Replying toEfficient Charity: Cheap Utilons via bone marrow registration

multifoliaterose14y

Efficient Charity: Cheap Utilons via bone marrow registration

GiveWell itself (it directs multiple dollars to its top charities on the dollar invested, as far as I can see, and powers the growth of an effective philanthropy movement with broader implications).

There's an issue of room for more funding.

Some research in the model of Poverty Action Lab.

What information do we have from Poverty Action Lab that we wouldn't have otherwise? (This is not intended as a rhetorical question; I don't know much about what Poverty Action Lab has done).

A portfolio of somewhat outre endeavours like Paul Romer's Charter Cities.

Even in the face of the possibility of such endeavors systematically doing more harm than good due to culture clash?

Political lobbying for AMF-style interventions

... (read more)

Replying toOn Saying the Obvious

multifoliaterose14y

On Saying the Obvious

Saying that something is 'obvious' can provide useful information to the listener of the form "If you think about this for a few minutes you'll see why this is true; this stands in contrast with some of the things that I'm talking about today." Or even "though you may not understand why this is true, for experts who are deeply immersed in this theory this part appears to be straightforward."

I personal wish that textbooks more often highlighted the essential points over those theorems that follow from a standard method that the reader is probably familiar with.

But here I really have in mind graduate / research level math where there's widespread understanding that a high percentage of the time people are unable to follow someone who believes his or her work to be intelligible and so who have a prior against such remarks being intended as a slight. It seems like a bad communication strategy for communicating with people who are not in such a niche.

Replying toHow I Ended Up Non-Ambitious

multifoliaterose14y

How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious

Do you know of anyone who tried and quit?

No, I don't. This thread touches on important issues which warrant fuller discussion; I'll mull them over and might post more detailed thoughts under the discussion board later on.

Last chance to donate for 2011

multifoliaterose

14y

Many LW readers choose to direct their charitable donations to SingInst with a view toward reducing existential risk. Others do not, whether because they feel they lack an understanding of the relevant issues, because they value present day humans more than future humans or because they have concern as to the incentive effects that would be created by donating to SingInst at present. I personally feel that there's a strong case for saving money to donate later on account of better information being available in the future.

However, I feel cognitive dissonance attached to saving to donate later rather than now. If you are in this camp you might consider donating to GiveWell's top... (read 173 more words →)

[Link] New arm of GiveWell Research: GiveWell Labs

multifoliaterose

14y

Announcing GiveWell Labs

We’re now launching a new initiative within GiveWell that will not be subject to either of these constraints. We plan to invest about 25% of our research time in what we’re calling GiveWell Labs: an arm of our research process that will be open to any giving opportunity, no matter what form and what sector.
Through GiveWell Labs, we will try to identify outstanding giving opportunities (whether they’re organizations or specific projects), publish rankings of these giving opportunities (separate from the top charities list we maintain using our existing research process) and try to raise money for these opportunities. Donors have pre-committed a minimum of $1 million to the GiveWell Labs

multifoliaterose

14y

Last month I was involved in a conversation thread about what the impact of a hypothetical nuclear war would be on existential risk.

There are many potential nuclear war scenarios which would have varying impacts on existential risk. It's difficult to know where to start to gain an understanding of the long-term of nuclear proliferation.

For concreteness, consider the case of an India-Pakistan nuclear war.

According to Local Nuclear War, Global Suffering by Robock and Toon,

India and Pakistan, long at odds, have more than 50 nuclear warheads apiece; if each country dropped that many bombs on cities and industrial areas, the smoke from fires would stunt agriculture worldwide for 10 years.

[...]

1 billion people worldwide with

multifoliaterose

15y

From Risk Analysis of Nuclear Deterrence by Martin Hellman. See also http://nuclearrisk.org/

A full-scale nuclear war is not the only threat to humanity’s continued existence, and we should allocate resources commensurate with the various risks. A large asteroid colliding with the Earth could destroy humanity in the same way it is believed the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. Such NEO (near earth object) extinction events have a failure rate on the order of 10^-8 per year [Chapman & Morrison 1994].
During one century, that failure rate corresponds to one chance in a million of humanity being destroyed. While 10^-6 is a small probability, the associated cost is so high—infinite from our perspective—that some

... (read 235 more words →)

Decimal digit computations as a testing ground for reasoning about probabilities

multifoliaterose

15y

Points in this article emerged from a conversation with Anna Salamon

I think that thinking about decimal expansions of real numbers provides a good testing ground for one's intuition about probabilities. The context of computation is very different from most of the contexts that humans deal with; in particular it's much cleaner. As such, this testing ground should not be used in isolation; the understanding that one reaps from it needs to be integrated with knowledge from other contexts. Despite its limitations I think that it has something to add.

Given a computable real number x, a priori the probability that any string of n decimal digits comprises the first n decimal digits of... (read 417 more words →)

Efficient philanthropy: local vs. global approaches

multifoliaterose

15y

Edit: Carl Shulman made some remarks that have caused me to seriously question the soundness of the final section of this post. More on this at the end of the post.

Consider the following two approaches to philanthropy:

The “local” approach (associated with "satisficing") is to consider those philanthropic opportunities that are "close to oneself" in some sense (immediately salient, within one's own communities, in one's domains of expertise). The “global” approach (associated with "maximizing") is to survey the philanthropic landscape, search for the best philanthropic opportunities in absolute terms, and devote oneself to those.

In practice nobody's approach to philanthropy is genuinely entirely global; one is necessarily limited by the fact that the range... (read 1870 more words →)

Model Uncertainty, Pascalian Reasoning and Utilitarianism

multifoliaterose

15y

A mode of reasoning that sometimes comes up in discussion of existential risk is the following.

Person 1: According to model A (e.g. some Fermi calculation with probabilities coming from certain reference classes), pursuing course of action X will reduce existential risk by 10^-5; existential risk has an opportunity cost of 10²⁵ DALYs (*), therefore model A says the expected value of pursuing course of action X is 10²⁰ DALYs. Since course of action X requires 10⁹ dollars, the number of DALYs saved per dollar invested in course of action X is 10¹¹. Hence course of action X is... (read 1336 more words →)

155

Generalizing From One Example & Evolutionary Game Theory

multifoliaterose

15y

Back in April 2010 Robin Hanson wrote a post titled Homo Hypocritus Signals. Hal Finney wrote a comment

This reasoning does offer an explanation for why big brains might have evolved, to help walk the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Still it seems like the basic puzzle remains: why is this hypocrisy unconscious? Why do our conscious minds remain unaware of our subconscious signaling?

to which Vladimir M responded. This post is a short addendum to the discussion.

In Generalizing From One Example Yvain wrote

There's some evidence that the usual method of interacting with people involves something sorta like emulating them within our own brain. We think about

... (read 261 more words →)

[Reference request] Article by scientist giving lower and upper bounds on the probability of superintelligence

multifoliaterose

15y

A few months back somebody posted an article by a scientist giving lower and upper bounds on the probability of superintelligence. He broke up the calculation as a Fermi calculation with three parts (EDIT: See LocustBeanGum's answer). Does anybody remember this article and if so can you provide a link?

John Baez Interviews with Eliezer (Parts 2 and 3)

multifoliaterose

15y

John Baez's This Week's Finds (Week 311) [Part 1; added for convenience following Nancy Lebovitz's comment]

John Baez's This Week's Finds (Week 312)

John Baez's This Week's Finds (Week 313)

I really like Eliezer's response to John Baez's last question in Week 313 about environmentalism vs. AI risks. I think it satisfactorily deflects much of the concern that I had when I wrote The Importance of Self-Doubt.

Eliezer says

Anyway: In terms of expected utility maximization, even large probabilities of jumping the interval between a universe-history in which 95% of existing biological species survive Earth’s 21st century, versus a universe-history where 80% of species survive, are just about impossible to trade off against tiny probabilities of jumping

... (read more)

LESSWRONG
LW

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LW

Reflections on a Personal Public Relations Failure: A Lesson in Communication

Existential Risk and Public Relations

Efficient Charity

Other Existential Risks

multifoliaterose

multifoliaterose

Last chance to donate for 2011

[Link] New arm of GiveWell Research: GiveWell Labs

Impact of India-Pakistan nuclear war on x-risk?

[LINK] Brief Discussion of Asteroid & Nuclear Risk from paper by Hellman

Decimal digit computations as a testing ground for reasoning about probabilities

Efficient philanthropy: local vs. global approaches

Model Uncertainty, Pascalian Reasoning and Utilitarianism

multifoliaterose

Reflections on a Personal Public Relations Failure: A Lesson in Communication

Existential Risk and Public Relations

Efficient Charity

Other Existential Risks

multifoliaterose

multifoliaterose

Last chance to donate for 2011

[Link] New arm of GiveWell Research: GiveWell Labs

Impact of India-Pakistan nuclear war on x-risk?

[LINK] Brief Discussion of Asteroid & Nuclear Risk from paper by Hellman

Decimal digit computations as a testing ground for reasoning about probabilities

Efficient philanthropy: local vs. global approaches

Model Uncertainty, Pascalian Reasoning and Utilitarianism